Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Anastasia Antsiferova

Publications and source records attributed to Anastasia Antsiferova.

34 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

Cross-Modal Transferable Image-to-Video Attack on Video Quality Metrics

Recent studies have revealed that modern image and video quality assessment (IQA/VQA) metrics are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. An attacker can manipulate a video through preprocessing to artificially increase its quality score according to a certain metric, despite no actual improvement in visual quality. Most of the attacks studied in the literature are white-box attacks, while black-box attacks in the context of VQA have received less attention. Moreover, some research indicates a lack of transferability of adversarial examples generated for one model to another when applied to VQA. In this paper, we propose a cross-modal attack method, IC2VQA, aimed at exploring the vulnerabilities of modern VQA models. This approach is motivated by the observation that the low-level feature spaces of images and videos are similar. We investigate the transferability of adversarial perturbations across different modalities; specifically, we analyze how adversarial perturbations generated on a white-box IQA model with an additional CLIP module can effectively target a VQA model. The addition of the CLIP module serves as a valuable aid in increasing transferability, as the CLIP model is known for its effective capture of low-level semantics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IC2VQA achieves a high success rate in attacking three black-box VQA models. We compare our method with existing black-box attack strategies, highlighting its superiority in terms of attack success within the same number of iterations and levels of attack strength. We believe that the proposed method will contribute to the deeper analysis of robust VQA metrics.

cs.CV↗

Accelerated zero-order SGD under high-order smoothness and overparameterized regime

We present a novel gradient-free algorithm to solve a convex stochastic optimization problem, such as those encountered in medicine, physics, and machine learning (e.g., adversarial multi-armed bandit problem), where the objective function can only be computed through numerical simulation, either as the result of a real experiment or as feedback given by the function evaluations from an adversary. Thus we suppose that only a black-box access to the function values of the objective is available, possibly corrupted by adversarial noise: deterministic or stochastic. The noisy setup can arise naturally from modeling randomness within a simulation or by computer discretization, or when exact values of function are forbidden due to privacy issues, or when solving non-convex problems as convex ones with an inexact function oracle. By exploiting higher-order smoothness, fulfilled, e.g., in logistic regression, we improve the performance of zero-order methods developed under the assumption of classical smoothness (or having a Lipschitz gradient). The proposed algorithm enjoys optimal oracle complexity and is designed under an overparameterization setup, i.e., when the number of model parameters is much larger than the size of the training dataset. Overparametrized models fit to the training data perfectly while also having good generalization and outperforming underparameterized models on unseen data. We provide convergence guarantees for the proposed algorithm under both types of noise. Moreover, we estimate the maximum permissible adversarial noise level that maintains the desired accuracy in the Euclidean setup, and then we extend our results to a non-Euclidean setup. Our theoretical results are verified on the logistic regression problem.

math.OC↗

Stochastic BIQA: Median Randomized Smoothing for Certified Blind Image Quality Assessment

Most modern No-Reference Image-Quality Assessment (NR-IQA) metrics are based on neural networks vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Attacks on such metrics lead to incorrect image/video quality predictions, which poses significant risks, especially in public benchmarks. Developers of image processing algorithms may unfairly increase the score of a target IQA metric without improving the actual quality of the adversarial image. Although some empirical defenses for IQA metrics were proposed, they do not provide theoretical guarantees and may be vulnerable to adaptive attacks. This work focuses on developing a provably robust no-reference IQA metric. Our method is based on Median Smoothing (MS) combined with an additional convolution denoiser with ranking loss to improve the SROCC and PLCC scores of the defended IQA metric. Compared with two prior methods on three datasets, our method exhibited superior SROCC and PLCC scores while maintaining comparable certified guarantees.

eess.IV↗

Exploring adversarial robustness of JPEG AI: methodology, comparison and new methods

Adversarial robustness of neural networks is an increasingly important area of research, combining studies on computer vision models, large language models (LLMs), and others. With the release of JPEG AI - the first standard for end-to-end neural image compression (NIC) methods - the question of its robustness has become critically significant. JPEG AI is among the first international, real-world applications of neural-network-based models to be embedded in consumer devices. However, research on NIC robustness has been limited to open-source codecs and a narrow range of attacks. This paper proposes a new methodology for measuring NIC robustness to adversarial attacks. We present the first large-scale evaluation of JPEG AI's robustness, comparing it with other NIC models. Our evaluation results and code are publicly available online (link is hidden for a blind review).

eess.IV↗

AIM 2024 Challenge on Compressed Video Quality Assessment: Methods and Results

Video quality assessment (VQA) is a crucial task in the development of video compression standards, as it directly impacts the viewer experience. This paper presents the results of the Compressed Video Quality Assessment challenge, held in conjunction with the Advances in Image Manipulation (AIM) workshop at ECCV 2024. The challenge aimed to evaluate the performance of VQA methods on a diverse dataset of 459 videos, encoded with 14 codecs of various compression standards (AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, AV1, and VVC/H.266) and containing a comprehensive collection of compression artifacts. To measure the methods performance, we employed traditional correlation coefficients between their predictions and subjective scores, which were collected via large-scale crowdsourced pairwise human comparisons. For training purposes, participants were provided with the Compressed Video Quality Assessment Dataset (CVQAD), a previously developed dataset of 1022 videos. Up to 30 participating teams registered for the challenge, while we report the results of 6 teams, which submitted valid final solutions and code for reproducing the results. Moreover, we calculated and present the performance of state-of-the-art VQA methods on the developed dataset, providing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. The dataset, results, and online leaderboard are publicly available at https://challenges.videoprocessing.ai/challenges/compressedvideo-quality-assessment.html.

eess.IV↗

IOI: Invisible One-Iteration Adversarial Attack on No-Reference Image- and Video-Quality Metrics

No-reference image- and video-quality metrics are widely used in video processing benchmarks. The robustness of learning-based metrics under video attacks has not been widely studied. In addition to having success, attacks that can be employed in video processing benchmarks must be fast and imperceptible. This paper introduces an Invisible One-Iteration (IOI) adversarial attack on no reference image and video quality metrics. We compared our method alongside eight prior approaches using image and video datasets via objective and subjective tests. Our method exhibited superior visual quality across various attacked metric architectures while maintaining comparable attack success and speed. We made the code available on GitHub: https://github.com/katiashh/ioi-attack.

eess.IV↗

Ti-Patch: Tiled Physical Adversarial Patch for no-reference video quality metrics

Objective no-reference image- and video-quality metrics are crucial in many computer vision tasks. However, state-of-the-art no-reference metrics have become learning-based and are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. The vulnerability of quality metrics imposes restrictions on using such metrics in quality control systems and comparing objective algorithms. Also, using vulnerable metrics as a loss for deep learning model training can mislead training to worsen visual quality. Because of that, quality metrics testing for vulnerability is a task of current interest. This paper proposes a new method for testing quality metrics vulnerability in the physical space. To our knowledge, quality metrics were not previously tested for vulnerability to this attack; they were only tested in the pixel space. We applied a physical adversarial Ti-Patch (Tiled Patch) attack to quality metrics and did experiments both in pixel and physical space. We also performed experiments on the implementation of physical adversarial wallpaper. The proposed method can be used as additional quality metrics in vulnerability evaluation, complementing traditional subjective comparison and vulnerability tests in the pixel space. We made our code and adversarial videos available on GitHub: https://github.com/leonenkova/Ti-Patch.

cs.CV↗

Adversarial purification for no-reference image-quality metrics: applicability study and new methods

Recently, the area of adversarial attacks on image quality metrics has begun to be explored, whereas the area of defences remains under-researched. In this study, we aim to cover that case and check the transferability of adversarial purification defences from image classifiers to IQA methods. In this paper, we apply several widespread attacks on IQA models and examine the success of the defences against them. The purification methodologies covered different preprocessing techniques, including geometrical transformations, compression, denoising, and modern neural network-based methods. Also, we address the challenge of assessing the efficacy of a defensive methodology by proposing ways to estimate output visual quality and the success of neutralizing attacks. Defences were tested against attack on three IQA metrics -- Linearity, MetaIQA and SPAQ. The code for attacks and defences is available at: (link is hidden for a blind review).

cs.CV↗

Comparing the Robustness of Modern No-Reference Image- and Video-Quality Metrics to Adversarial Attacks

Nowadays, neural-network-based image- and video-quality metrics perform better than traditional methods. However, they also became more vulnerable to adversarial attacks that increase metrics' scores without improving visual quality. The existing benchmarks of quality metrics compare their performance in terms of correlation with subjective quality and calculation time. Nonetheless, the adversarial robustness of image-quality metrics is also an area worth researching. This paper analyses modern metrics' robustness to different adversarial attacks. We adapted adversarial attacks from computer vision tasks and compared attacks' efficiency against 15 no-reference image- and video-quality metrics. Some metrics showed high resistance to adversarial attacks, which makes their usage in benchmarks safer than vulnerable metrics. The benchmark accepts submissions of new metrics for researchers who want to make their metrics more robust to attacks or to find such metrics for their needs. The latest results can be found online: https://videoprocessing.ai/benchmarks/metrics-robustness.html.

cs.CV↗

Fast Adversarial CNN-based Perturbation Attack on No-Reference Image- and Video-Quality Metrics

Modern neural-network-based no-reference image- and video-quality metrics exhibit performance as high as full-reference metrics. These metrics are widely used to improve visual quality in computer vision methods and compare video processing methods. However, these metrics are not stable to traditional adversarial attacks, which can cause incorrect results. Our goal is to investigate the boundaries of no-reference metrics applicability, and in this paper, we propose a fast adversarial perturbation attack on no-reference quality metrics. The proposed attack (FACPA) can be exploited as a preprocessing step in real-time video processing and compression algorithms. This research can yield insights to further aid in designing of stable neural-network-based no-reference quality metrics.

cs.CV↗

Video compression dataset and benchmark of learning-based video-quality metrics

Video-quality measurement is a critical task in video processing. Nowadays, many implementations of new encoding standards - such as AV1, VVC, and LCEVC - use deep-learning-based decoding algorithms with perceptual metrics that serve as optimization objectives. But investigations of the performance of modern video- and image-quality metrics commonly employ videos compressed using older standards, such as AVC. In this paper, we present a new benchmark for video-quality metrics that evaluates video compression. It is based on a new dataset consisting of about 2,500 streams encoded using different standards, including AVC, HEVC, AV1, VP9, and VVC. Subjective scores were collected using crowdsourced pairwise comparisons. The list of evaluated metrics includes recent ones based on machine learning and neural networks. The results demonstrate that new no-reference metrics exhibit a high correlation with subjective quality and approach the capability of top full-reference metrics.

cs.CV↗

Universal Perturbation Attack on Differentiable No-Reference Image- and Video-Quality Metrics

Universal adversarial perturbation attacks are widely used to analyze image classifiers that employ convolutional neural networks. Nowadays, some attacks can deceive image- and video-quality metrics. So sustainability analysis of these metrics is important. Indeed, if an attack can confuse the metric, an attacker can easily increase quality scores. When developers of image- and video-algorithms can boost their scores through detached processing, algorithm comparisons are no longer fair. Inspired by the idea of universal adversarial perturbation for classifiers, we suggest a new method to attack differentiable no-reference quality metrics through universal perturbation. We applied this method to seven no-reference image- and video-quality metrics (PaQ-2-PiQ, Linearity, VSFA, MDTVSFA, KonCept512, Nima and SPAQ). For each one, we trained a universal perturbation that increases the respective scores. We also propose a method for assessing metric stability and identify the metrics that are the most vulnerable and the most resistant to our attack. The existence of successful universal perturbations appears to diminish the metric's ability to provide reliable scores. We therefore recommend our proposed method as an additional verification of metric reliability to complement traditional subjective tests and benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

ERQA: Edge-Restoration Quality Assessment for Video Super-Resolution

Despite the growing popularity of video super-resolution (VSR), there is still no good way to assess the quality of the restored details in upscaled frames. Some SR methods may produce the wrong digit or an entirely different face. Whether a method's results are trustworthy depends on how well it restores truthful details. Image super-resolution can use natural distributions to produce a high-resolution image that is only somewhat similar to the real one. VSR enables exploration of additional information in neighboring frames to restore details from the original scene. The ERQA metric, which we propose in this paper, aims to estimate a model's ability to restore real details using VSR. On the assumption that edges are significant for detail and character recognition, we chose edge fidelity as the foundation for this metric. Experimental validation of our work is based on the MSU Video Super-Resolution Benchmark, which includes the most difficult patterns for detail restoration and verifies the fidelity of details from the original frame. Code for the proposed metric is publicly available at https://github.com/msu-video-group/ERQA.

eess.IV↗

Shot boundary detection method based on a new extensive dataset and mixed features

Shot boundary detection in video is one of the key stages of video data processing. A new method for shot boundary detection based on several video features, such as color histograms and object boundaries, has been proposed. The developed algorithm was tested on the open BBC Planet Earth [1] and RAI [2] datasets, and the MSU CC datasets, based on videos used in the video codec comparison conducted at MSU, as well as videos from the IBM set, were also plotted. The total dataset for algorithm development and testing exceeded the known TRECVID datasets. Based on the test results, the proposed algorithm for scene change detection outperformed its counterparts with a final F-score of 0.9794.

cs.CV↗

Hacking VMAF and VMAF NEG: vulnerability to different preprocessing methods

Video-quality measurement plays a critical role in the development of video-processing applications. In this paper, we show how video preprocessing can artificially increase the popular quality metric VMAF and its tuning-resistant version, VMAF NEG. We propose a pipeline that tunes processing-algorithm parameters to increase VMAF by up to 218.8%. A subjective comparison revealed that for most preprocessing methods, a video's visual quality drops or stays unchanged. We also show that some preprocessing methods can increase VMAF NEG scores by up to 23.6%.

cs.MM↗

Objective video quality metrics application to video codecs comparisons: choosing the best for subjective quality estimation

Quality assessment plays a key role in creating and comparing video compression algorithms. Despite the development of a large number of new methods for assessing quality, generally accepted and well-known codecs comparisons mainly use the classical methods like PSNR, SSIM and new method VMAF. These methods can be calculated following different rules: they can use different frame-by-frame averaging techniques or different summation of color components. In this paper, a fundamental comparison of various versions of generally accepted metrics is carried out to find the most relevant and recommended versions of video quality metrics to be used in codecs comparisons. For comparison, we used a set of videos encoded with video codecs of different standards, and visual quality scores collected for the resulting set of streams since 2018 until 2021

cs.MM↗