A Survey on Physical Adversarial Attack in Computer Vision

Abstract: Over the past decade, deep learning has revolutionized conventional tasks that rely on hand-craft feature extraction with its strong feature learning capability, leading to substantial enhancements in traditional tasks. However, deep neural networks (DNNs) have been demonstrated to be vulnerable to adversarial examples crafted by malicious tiny noise, which is imperceptible to human observers but can make DNNs output the wrong result. Existing adversarial attacks can be categorized into digital and physical adversarial attacks. The former is designed to pursue strong attack performance in lab environments while hardly remaining effective when applied to the physical world. In contrast, the latter focus on developing physical deployable attacks, thus exhibiting more robustness in complex physical environmental conditions. Recently, with the increasing deployment of the DNN-based system in the real world, strengthening the robustness of these systems is an emergency, while exploring physical adversarial attacks exhaustively is the precondition. To this end, this paper reviews the evolution of physical adversarial attacks against DNN-based computer vision tasks, expecting to provide beneficial information for developing stronger physical adversarial attacks. Specifically, we first proposed a taxonomy to categorize the current physical adversarial attacks and grouped them. Then, we discuss the existing physical attacks and focus on the technique for improving the robustness of physical attacks under complex physical environmental conditions. Finally, we discuss the issues of the current physical adversarial attacks to be solved and give promising directions.