Stealthiness Assessment of Adversarial Perturbation: From a Visual Perspective

Assessing the stealthiness of adversarial perturbations is challenging due to the lack of appropriate evaluation metrics. Existing evaluation metrics, e.g., $L_{p}$ norms or Image Quality Assessment (IQA), fall short of assessing the pixel-level stealthiness of subtle adversarial perturbations since these metrics are primarily designed for traditional distortions. To bridge this gap, we present the first comprehensive study on the subjective and objective assessment of the stealthiness of adversarial perturbations from a visual perspective at a pixel level. Specifically, we propose new subjective assessment criteria for human observers to score adversarial stealthiness in a fine-grained manner. Then, we create a large-scale adversarial example dataset comprising 10586 pairs of clean and adversarial samples encompassing twelve state-of-the-art adversarial attacks. To obtain the subjective scores according to the proposed criterion, we recruit 60 human observers, and each adversarial example is evaluated by at least 15 observers. The mean opinion score of each adversarial example is utilized for labeling. Finally, we develop a three-stage objective scoring model that mimics human scoring habits to predict adversarial perturbation’s stealthiness. Experimental results demonstrate that our objective model exhibits superior consistency with the human visual system, surpassing commonly employed metrics like PSNR and SSIM.