Physical Adversarial Attacks on an Aerial Imagery Object Detector

Understand

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become essential for processing the vast amounts of aerial imagery collected using earth-observing satellite platforms.

• However, DNNs are vulnerable towards adversarial examples, and it is expected that this weakness also plagues DNNs for aerial imagery.
• In this work, we demonstrate one of the first efforts on physical adversarial attacks on aerial imagery, whereby adversarial patches were optimised, fabricated and installed on or near target objects (cars) to significantly reduce the efficacy of an object detector applied on overhead images.
• Physical adversarial attacks on aerial images, particularly those captured from satellite platforms, are challenged by atmospheric factors (lighting, weather, seasons) and the distance between the observer and target.