Adversarial Attack with Raindrops

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are usually designed artificially to fool DNNs, but rarely exist in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we study the adversarial examples caused by raindrops, to demonstrate that there exist plenty of natural phenomena being able to work as adversarial attackers to DNNs. Moreover, we present a new approach to generate adversarial raindrops, denoted as AdvRD, using the generative adversarial network (GAN) technique to simulate natural raindrops. The images crafted by our AdvRD look very similar to the real-world raindrop images, statistically close to the distribution of true raindrop images, and more importantly, can perform strong adversarial attack to the state-of-the-art DNN models. On the other side, we show that the adversarial training using our AdvRD images can significantly improve the robustness of DNNs to the real-world raindrop attacks. Extensive experiments are carried out to demonstrate that the images crafted by AdvRD are visually and statistically close to the natural raindrop images, can work as strong attackers to DNN models, and also help improve the robustness of DNNs to raindrop attacks.