Lei Fang

h-index12
2papers
464citations

2 Papers

11.8CVAug 3, 2025
Beyond Vulnerabilities: A Survey of Adversarial Attacks as Both Threats and Defenses in Computer Vision Systems

Zhongliang Guo, Yifei Qian, Yanli Li et al.

Adversarial attacks against computer vision systems have emerged as a critical research area that challenges the fundamental assumptions about neural network robustness and security. This comprehensive survey examines the evolving landscape of adversarial techniques, revealing their dual nature as both sophisticated security threats and valuable defensive tools. We provide a systematic analysis of adversarial attack methodologies across three primary domains: pixel-space attacks, physically realizable attacks, and latent-space attacks. Our investigation traces the technical evolution from early gradient-based methods such as FGSM and PGD to sophisticated optimization techniques incorporating momentum, adaptive step sizes, and advanced transferability mechanisms. We examine how physically realizable attacks have successfully bridged the gap between digital vulnerabilities and real-world threats through adversarial patches, 3D textures, and dynamic optical perturbations. Additionally, we explore the emergence of latent-space attacks that leverage semantic structure in internal representations to create more transferable and meaningful adversarial examples. Beyond traditional offensive applications, we investigate the constructive use of adversarial techniques for vulnerability assessment in biometric authentication systems and protection against malicious generative models. Our analysis reveals critical research gaps, particularly in neural style transfer protection and computational efficiency requirements. This survey contributes a comprehensive taxonomy, evolution analysis, and identification of future research directions, aiming to advance understanding of adversarial vulnerabilities and inform the development of more robust and trustworthy computer vision systems.

12.8CVJan 18, 2024Code
Artwork Protection Against Neural Style Transfer Using Locally Adaptive Adversarial Color Attack

Zhongliang Guo, Junhao Dong, Yifei Qian et al.

Neural style transfer (NST) generates new images by combining the style of one image with the content of another. However, unauthorized NST can exploit artwork, raising concerns about artists' rights and motivating the development of proactive protection methods. We propose Locally Adaptive Adversarial Color Attack (LAACA), empowering artists to protect their artwork from unauthorized style transfer by processing before public release. By delving into the intricacies of human visual perception and the role of different frequency components, our method strategically introduces frequency-adaptive perturbations in the image. These perturbations significantly degrade the generation quality of NST while maintaining an acceptable level of visual change in the original image, ensuring that potential infringers are discouraged from using the protected artworks, because of its bad NST generation quality. Additionally, existing metrics often overlook the importance of color fidelity in evaluating color-mattered tasks, such as the quality of NST-generated images, which is crucial in the context of artistic works. To comprehensively assess the color-mattered tasks, we propose the Adversarial Color Distance Metric (ACDM), designed to quantify the color difference of images pre- and post-manipulations. Experimental results confirm that attacking NST using LAACA results in visually inferior style transfer, and the ACDM can efficiently measure color-mattered tasks. By providing artists with a tool to safeguard their intellectual property, our work relieves the socio-technical challenges posed by the misuse of NST in the art community.