Temporal-Distributed Backdoor Attack against Video Based Action Recognition

Xi Li, Songhe Wang, Ruiquan Huang, Mahanth Gowda, George Kesidis

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved tremendous success in various applications including video action recognition, yet remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks (Trojans). The backdoor-compromised model will mis-classify to the target class chosen by the attacker when a test instance (from a non-target class) is embedded with a specific trigger, while maintaining high accuracy on attack-free instances. Although there are extensive studies on backdoor attacks against image data, the susceptibility of video-based systems under backdoor attacks remains largely unexplored. Current studies are direct extensions of approaches proposed for image data, e.g., the triggers are independently embedded within the frames, which tend to be detectable by existing defenses. In this paper, we introduce a simple yet effective backdoor attack against video data. Our proposed attack, adding perturbations in a transformed domain, plants an imperceptible, temporally distributed trigger across the video frames, and is shown to be resilient to existing defensive strategies. The effectiveness of the proposed attack is demonstrated by extensive experiments with various well-known models on two video recognition benchmarks, UCF101 and HMDB51, and a sign language recognition benchmark, Greek Sign Language (GSL) dataset. We delve into the impact of several influential factors on our proposed attack and identify an intriguing effect termed “collateral damage” through extensive studies.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)3199-3207
Number of pages9
JournalProceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Volume38
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 25 2024
Event38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2024 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: Feb 20 2024Feb 27 2024

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Artificial Intelligence

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