ECE Colloquium Series: Andrea Cavallaro

Title: Adversarial Attacks on Image Classifiers

Presenter: Andrea Cavallaro

Abstract: Images we share online reveal information about personal choices and preferences, which can be inferred by classifiers. To prevent privacy violations and to protect the visual content from unwanted automatic inferences, I will discuss how to exploit the vulnerability of classifiers to adversarial attacks to craft perturbations that maintain (and even improve) image quality. As adversarial perturbations designed to protect visual content against classifiers may be ineffective against classifiers that were not seen during the generation of the perturbation or against defences that use re-quantization or image compression, I will discuss how to craft perturbations based on randomised ensembles to make them robust to defences, on image semantics to selectively modify colours within chosen ranges that are perceived as natural by humans, and on perturbations that enhance image details. I will conclude the talk by discussing how a similar approach can be used to protect privacy in audio signals.

Bio: Andrea Cavallaro is Professor of Multimedia Signal Processing and the founding Director of the Centre for Intelligent Sensing at Queen Mary University of London, UK. He is Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) and Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. He is Editor-in-Chief of Signal Processing: Image Communication; Chair of the IEEE Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee; an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer; an elected member of the IEEE Video Signal Processing and Communication Technical Committee; and a  Senior Area Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing.Prof. Cavallaro received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, in 2002. He was a Research Fellow with British Telecommunications (BT) in 2004/2005 and was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering Teaching Prize in 2007; three student paper awards on target tracking and perceptually sensitive coding at IEEE ICASSP in 2005, 2007 and 2009; and the best paper award at IEEE AVSS 2009. He is a past Area Editor for the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2012-2014) and past Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (2011-2015), IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2009-2011), IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (2009-2010), IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2008-2011) and IEEE Multimedia. He is a past elected member of the IEEE Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee and past chair of the Awards committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee. Prof. Cavallaro has published over 280 journal and conference papers, one monograph on Video tracking (2011, Wiley) and three edited books: Multi-camera networks (2009, Elsevier); Analysis, retrieval and delivery of multimedia content (2012, Springer); and Intelligent multimedia surveillance (2013, Springer).

Zoom link: https://bit.ly/36XXNye

When 11:00 am to 12:00 pm on Thursday, February 25, 2021