Guardians of Image Quality: Benchmarking Defenses Against Adversarial Attacks on Image Quality Metrics

In the field of Image Quality Assessment (IQA), the adversarial robustness of the metrics poses a critical concern. This paper presents a comprehensive benchmarking study of various defense mechanisms in response to the rise in adversarial attacks on IQA. We systematically evaluate 25 defense strategies, including adversarial purification, adversarial training, and certified robustness methods. We applied 14 adversarial attack algorithms of various types in both non-adaptive and adaptive settings and tested these defenses against them. We analyze the differences between defenses and their applicability to IQA tasks, considering that they should preserve IQA scores and image quality. The proposed benchmark aims to guide future developments and accepts submissions of new methods, with the latest results available online: https://videoprocessing.ai/benchmarks/iqa-defenses.html.

Ti-Patch: Tiled Physical Adversarial Patch for no-reference video quality metrics

Objective no-reference image- and video-quality metrics are crucial in many computer vision tasks. However, state-of-the-art no-reference metrics have become learning-based and are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. The vulnerability of quality metrics imposes restrictions on using such metrics in quality control systems and comparing objective algorithms. Also, using vulnerable metrics as a loss for deep learning model training can mislead training to worsen visual quality. Because of that, quality metrics testing for vulnerability is a task of current interest. This paper proposes a new method for testing quality metrics vulnerability in the physical space. To our knowledge, quality metrics were not previously tested for vulnerability to this attack; they were only tested in the pixel space. We applied a physical adversarial Ti-Patch (Tiled Patch) attack to quality metrics and did experiments both in pixel and physical space. We also performed experiments on the implementation of physical adversarial wallpaper. The proposed method can be used as additional quality metrics in vulnerability evaluation, complementing traditional subjective comparison and vulnerability tests in the pixel space. We made our code and adversarial videos available on GitHub: https://github.com/leonenkova/Ti-Patch.

IOI: Invisible One-Iteration Adversarial Attack on No-Reference Image- and Video-Quality Metrics

No-reference image- and video-quality metrics are widely used in video processing benchmarks. The robustness of learning-based metrics under video attacks has not been widely studied. In addition to having success, attacks that can be employed in video processing benchmarks must be fast and imperceptible. This paper introduces an Invisible One-Iteration (IOI) adversarial attack on no reference image and video quality metrics. We compared our method alongside eight prior approaches using image and video datasets via objective and subjective tests. Our method exhibited superior visual quality across various attacked metric architectures while maintaining comparable attack success and speed. We made the code available on GitHub.

Comparing the robustness of modern no-reference image- and video-quality metrics to adversarial attacks

Nowadays neural-network-based image- and video-quality metrics show better performance compared to traditional methods. However, they also became more vulnerable to adversarial attacks that increase metrics' scores without improving visual quality. The existing benchmarks of quality metrics compare their performance in terms of correlation with subjective quality and calculation time. However, the adversarial robustness of image-quality metrics is also an area worth researching. In this paper, we analyse modern metrics' robustness to different adversarial attacks. We adopted adversarial attacks from computer vision tasks and compared attacks' efficiency against 15 no-reference image/video-quality metrics. Some metrics showed high resistance to adversarial attacks which makes their usage in benchmarks safer than vulnerable metrics. The benchmark accepts new metrics submissions for researchers who want to make their metrics more robust to attacks or to find such metrics for their needs. Try our benchmark using pip install robustness-benchmark.

Fast Adversarial CNN-based Perturbation Attack on No-Reference Image- and Video-Quality Metrics

Modern neural-network-based no-reference image- and video-quality metrics exhibit performance as high as full-reference metrics. These metrics are widely used to improve visual quality in computer vision methods and compare video processing methods. However, these metrics are not stable to traditional adversarial attacks, which can cause incorrect results. Our goal is to investigate the boundaries of no-reference metrics applicability, and in this paper, we propose a fast adversarial perturbation attack on no-reference quality metrics. The proposed attack (FACPA) can be exploited as a preprocessing step in real-time video processing and compression algorithms. This research can yield insights to further aid in designing of stable neural-network-based no-reference quality metrics.

Universal Perturbation Attack on Differentiable No-Reference Image- and Video-Quality Metrics

Universal adversarial perturbation attacks are widely used to analyze image classifiers that employ convolutional neural networks. Nowadays, some attacks can deceive image- and video-quality metrics. So sustainability analysis of these metrics is important. Indeed, if an attack can confuse the metric, an attacker can easily increase quality scores. When developers of image- and video-algorithms can boost their scores through detached processing, algorithm comparisons are no longer fair. Inspired by the idea of universal adversarial perturbation for classifiers, we suggest a new method to attack differentiable no-reference quality metrics through universal perturbation. We applied this method to seven no-reference image- and video-quality metrics (PaQ-2-PiQ, Linearity, VSFA, MDTVSFA, KonCept512, Nima and SPAQ). For each one, we trained a universal perturbation that increases the respective scores. We also propose a method for assessing metric stability and identify the metrics that are the most vulnerable and the most resistant to our attack. The existence of successful universal perturbations appears to diminish the metric's ability to provide reliable scores. We therefore recommend our proposed method as an additional verification of metric reliability to complement traditional subjective tests and benchmarks.