Adversarial Attacks Against Blind Image Quality Assessment Models

Several deep models for blind image quality assessment (BIQA) have been proposed during the past few years, with promising results on standard image quality datasets. However, generalization of BIQA models beyond the standard content remains a challenge. In this paper, we study basic adversarial attack techniques to assess the robustness of representative deep BIQA models. Our results show that adversarial images created for a simple substitute BIQA model (i.e. white-box scenario) are transferable as such and able to deceive also several other more complex BIQA models (i.e. black-box scenario). We also investigated some basic defense mechanisms. Our results indicate that re-training BIQA models with a dataset augmented with adversarial images improves robustness of several models, but at the cost of decreased quality prediction accuracy on genuine images.