Semantically Stealthy Adversarial Attacks against Segmentation Models

Abstract: Segmentation models have been found to be vulnerable to targeted and non-targeted adversarial attacks. However, the resulting segmentation outputs are often so damaged that it is easy to spot an attack. In this paper, we propose semantically stealthy adversarial attacks which can manipulate targeted labels while preserving non-targeted labels at the same time. One challenge is making semantically meaningful manipulations across datasets and models. Another challenge is avoiding damaging non-targeted labels. To solve these challenges, we consider each input image as prior knowledge to generate perturbations. We also design a special regularizer to help extract features. To evaluate our model's performance, we design three basic attack types, namely vanishing into the context,'embedding fake labels,' and `displacing target objects.' Our experiments show that our stealthy adversarial model can attack segmentation models with a relatively high success rate on Cityscapes, Mapillary, and BDD100K. Our framework shows good empirical generalization across datasets and models.