Physical world assistive signals for deep neural network classifiers -- neither defense nor attack

Deep Neural Networks lead the state of the art of computer vision tasks. Despite this, Neural Networks are brittle in that small changes in the input can drastically affect their prediction outcome and confidence. Consequently and naturally, research in this area mainly focus on adversarial attacks and defenses. In this paper, we take an alternative stance and introduce the concept of Assistive Signals, which are optimized to improve a model's confidence score regardless if it's under attack or not. We analyse some interesting properties of these assistive perturbations and extend the idea to optimize assistive signals in the 3D space for real-life scenarios simulating different lighting conditions and viewing angles. Experimental evaluations show that the assistive signals generated by our optimization method increase the accuracy and confidence of deep models more than those generated by conventional methods that work in the 2D space. In addition, our Assistive Signals illustrate the intrinsic bias of ML models towards certain patterns in real-life objects. We discuss how we can exploit these insights to re-think, or avoid, some patterns that might contribute to, or degrade, the detectability of objects in the real-world.

Optimizing Auto-correlation for Fast Target Search in Large Search Space

In remote sensing image-blurring is induced by many sources such as atmospheric scatter, optical aberration, spatial and temporal sensor integration. The natural blurring can be exploited to speed up target search by fast template matching. In this paper, we synthetically induce additional non-uniform blurring to further increase the speed of the matching process. To avoid loss of accuracy, the amount of synthetic blurring is varied spatially over the image according to the underlying content. We extend transitive algorithm for fast template matching by incorporating controlled image blur. To this end we propose an Efficient Group Size (EGS) algorithm which minimizes the number of similarity computations for a particular search image. A larger efficient group size guarantees less computations and more speedup. EGS algorithm is used as a component in our proposed Optimizing auto-correlation (OptA) algorithm. In OptA a search image is iteratively non-uniformly blurred while ensuring no accuracy degradation at any image location. In each iteration efficient group size and overall computations are estimated by using the proposed EGS algorithm. The OptA algorithm stops when the number of computations cannot be further decreased without accuracy degradation. The proposed algorithm is compared with six existing state of the art exhaustive accuracy techniques using correlation coefficient as the similarity measure. Experiments on satellite and aerial image datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.