Poisoning Attacks against Feature-Based Image Classification

Adversarial machine learning and the robustness of machine learning is gaining attention, especially in image classification. Attacks based on data poisoning, with the aim to lower the integrity or availability of a model, showed high success rates, while barely reducing the classifiers accuracy - particularly against Deep Learning approaches such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). While Deep Learning has become the most prominent technique for many pattern recognition tasks, feature-extraction based systems still have their applications - and there is surprisingly little research dedicated to the vulnerability of those approaches. We address this gap and show preliminary results in evaluating poisoning attacks against feature-extraction based systems, and compare them to CNNs, on a traffic sign classification dataset. Our findings show that feature-extraction based ML systems require higher poisoning percentages to achieve similar backdoor success, and also need a consistent (static) backdoor position to work.