A Cascade Defense Method for Multidomain Adversarial Attacks under Remote Sensing Detection

Deep neural networks have been widely used in detection tasks based on optical remote sensing images. However, in recent studies, deep neural networks have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial examples. Adversarial examples are threatening in both the digital and physical domains. Specifically, they make it possible for adversarial examples to attack aerial remote sensing detection. To defend against adversarial attacks on aerial remote sensing detection, we propose a cascaded adversarial defense framework, which locates the adversarial patch according to its high frequency and saliency information in the gradient domain and removes it directly. The original image semantic and texture information is then restored by the image inpainting method. When combined with the random erasing algorithm, the robustness of detection is further improved. Our method is the first attempt to defend against adversarial examples in remote sensing detection. The experimental results show that our method is very effective in defending against real-world adversarial attacks. In particular, when using the YOLOv3 and YOLOv4 algorithms for robust detection of single-class targets, the AP60 of YOLOv3 and YOLOv4 only drop by 2.11% and 2.17%, respectively, under the adversarial example.