# Defense against Adversarial Cloud Attack on Remote Sensing Salient Object Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.17431 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17431/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Intriguing properties of neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6199/) (2013)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [Theoretically Principled Trade-off between Robustness and Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08573/) (2019)
- [Reliable evaluation of adversarial robustness with an ensemble of diverse parameter-free attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.01690/) (2020)
- [Certified Adversarial Robustness via Randomized Smoothing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.02918/) (2019)
- [Square Attack: a query-efficient black-box adversarial attack via random search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.00049/) (2019)
- [Adversarial Training for Free!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12843/) (2019)
- [DOTA: A Large-scale Dataset for Object Detection in Aerial Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10398/) (2017)
- [U2-Net: Going Deeper with Nested U-Structure for Salient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.09007/) (2020)
- [Nesterov Accelerated Gradient and Scale Invariance for Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06281/) (2019)
- [Minimally distorted Adversarial Examples with a Fast Adaptive Boundary Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02044/) (2019)
- [Defense against Adversarial Attacks Using High-Level Representation Guided Denoiser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.02976/) (2017)
- [Feature Denoising for Improving Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.03411/) (2018)
- [FFA-Net: Feature Fusion Attention Network for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07559/) (2019)
- [PixelDefend: Leveraging Generative Models to Understand and Defend against Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10766/) (2017)
- [Enhancing the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks through Variance Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15571/) (2021)
- [Defense Against Adversarial Attacks Using Feature Scattering-based Adversarial Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10764/) (2019)
- [Universal Physical Camouflage Attacks on Object Detectors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.04326/) (2019)
- [Metric Learning for Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00900/) (2019)
- [SafetyNet: Detecting and Rejecting Adversarial Examples Robustly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00103/) (2017)
- [Shield: Fast, Practical Defense and Vaccination for Deep Learning using JPEG Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06816/) (2018)
- [Cross-View Image Matching for Geo-localization in Urban Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07815/) (2017)
- [Dense Attention Fluid Network for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13144/) (2020)
- [Nested Network with Two-Stream Pyramid for Salient Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08462/) (2019)
- [Geometric robustness of deep networks: analysis and improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09115/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Deep Slow Feature Analysis for Change Detection in Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00645/) (2018)
- [Revisiting Street-to-Aerial View Image Geo-localization and Orientation Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11592/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [PhysMLE: Generalizable and Priors-Inclusive Multi-task Remote Physiological Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06201/) (2024)
- [Exploring Robust Features for Improving Adversarial Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.04650/) (2023)
- [Align the GAP: Prior-based Unified Multi-Task Remote Physiological Measurement Framework For Domain Generalization and Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16160/) (2025)
- [EVD4UAV: An Altitude-Sensitive Benchmark to Evade Vehicle Detection in UAV](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05422/) (2024)
- [Cloud Adversarial Example Generation for Remote Sensing Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.14240/) (2024)
- [Stealthy Multi-Task Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17936/) (2024)
- [Physically-Induced Atmospheric Adversarial Perturbations: Enhancing Transferability and Robustness in Remote Sensing Image Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14643/) (2026)
- [From Clouds to Hallucinations: Atmospheric Retrieval Hijacking in Remote Sensing Vision-Language RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07273/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Detecting the salient objects in a remote sensing image has wide applications for the interdisciplinary research. Many existing deep learning methods have been proposed for Salient Object Detection (SOD) in remote sensing images and get remarkable results. However, the recent adversarial attack examples, generated by changing a few pixel values on the original remote sensing image, could result in a collapse for the well-trained deep learning based SOD model. Different with existing methods adding perturbation to original images, we propose to jointly tune adversarial exposure and additive perturbation for attack and constrain image close to cloudy image as Adversarial Cloud. Cloud is natural and common in remote sensing images, however, camouflaging cloud based adversarial attack and defense for remote sensing images are not well studied before. Furthermore, we design DefenseNet as a learn-able pre-processing to the adversarial cloudy images so as to preserve the performance of the deep learning based remote sensing SOD model, without tuning the already deployed deep SOD model. By considering both regular and generalized adversarial examples, the proposed DefenseNet can defend the proposed Adversarial Cloud in white-box setting and other attack methods in black-box setting. Experimental results on a synthesized benchmark from the public remote sensing SOD dataset (EORSSD) show the promising defense against adversarial cloud attacks.