Local Pixel Attack Based on Sensitive Pixel Location for Remote Sensing Images

As deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used in the field of remote sensing image recognition, there is a model security issue that cannot be ignored. DNNs have been shown to be vulnerable to small perturbations in a large number of studies in the past, and this security risk naturally exists in remote sensing object detection models based on DNNs. The complexity of remote sensing object detection models makes it difficult to implement adversarial attacks on them, resulting in the current lack of systematic research on adversarial examples in the field of remote sensing image recognition. In order to better deal with the adversarial threats that remote sensing image recognition models may confront and to provide an effective means for evaluating the robustness of the models, this paper takes the adversarial examples for remote sensing image recognition as the research goal and systematically studies vanishing attacks against a remote sensing image object detection model. To solve the problem of difficult attack implementation on remote sensing image object detection, adversarial attack adaptation methods based on interpolation scaling and patch perturbation stacking are proposed in this paper, which realizes the adaptation of classical attack algorithms. We propose a hot restart perturbation update strategy and the joint attack of the first and second stages of the two-stage remote sensing object detection model is realized through the design of the attack loss function. For the problem of the modification cost of global pixel attack being too large, a local pixel attack algorithm based on sensitive pixel location is proposed in this paper. By searching the location of the sensitive pixels and constructing the mask of attack area, good local pixel attack effect is achieved. Experimental results show that the average pixel modification rate of the proposed attack method decreases to less than 4% and the vanishing rate can still be maintained above 80%, which effectively achieves the balance between attack effect and attack cost.