Differential Evolution based Dual Adversarial Camouflage: Fooling Human Eyes and Object Detectors

Recent studies reveal that deep neural network (DNN) based object detectors are vulnerable to adversarial attacks in the form of adding the perturbation to the images, leading to the wrong output of object detectors. Most current existing works focus on generating perturbed images, also called adversarial examples, to fool object detectors. Though the generated adversarial examples themselves can remain a certain naturalness, most of them can still be easily observed by human eyes, which limits their further application in the real world. To alleviate this problem, we propose a differential evolution based dual adversarial camouflage (DE_DAC) method, composed of two stages to fool human eyes and object detectors simultaneously. Specifically, we try to obtain the camouflage texture, which can be rendered over the surface of the object. In the first stage, we optimize the global texture to minimize the discrepancy between the rendered object and the scene images, making human eyes difficult to distinguish. In the second stage, we design three loss functions to optimize the local texture, making object detectors ineffective. In addition, we introduce the differential evolution algorithm to search for the near-optimal areas of the object to attack, improving the adversarial performance under certain attack area limitations. Besides, we also study the performance of adaptive DE_DAC, which can be adapted to the environment. Experiments show that our proposed method could obtain a good trade-off between the fooling human eyes and object detectors under multiple specific scenes and objects.