Making Adversarial Attack Imperceptible in Frequency Domain: A Watermark-based Framework

Hanxiu Zhang, Guitao Cao, Xinyue Zhang, Jing Xiang, Chunwei Wu

Abstract: With the development of multimedia communication technology, the image information stored in electronic devices faces increasing privacy risks and requires processing for protection. However, it is found that adversarial perturbations added to images for semantic information protection may corrupt the frequency domain watermarks added for copyright statement. With such challenges, we propose an Adversarial Frequency domain Watermarking (AFW) framework to protect images from both copyright and semantic content. Specifically, the AFW framework constructs the images as adversarial examples by embedding crafted adversarial watermarks in the frequency domain, followed by an optimization algorithm to improve the visual quality. Notably, AFW can generally integrate with existing watermark and attack methods. Extensive experiments on five network models and the ImageNet dataset demonstrate that the AFW framework can achieve information hiding and adversarial attacking goals under visual quality assurance.