Adversarial pan-sharpening attacks for object detection in remote sensing

Pan-sharpening, as one of the most commonly used techniques in remote sensing systems, aims to fuse texture-rich PAN images and multi-spectral MS images to obtain texture-rich MS images. With the development of deep learning, CNN based Pan-sharpening methods have received more and more attention in recent years. Since Pan-sharpening technique can integrate the complementary information of Pan and MS images, researchers usually apply object detectors on these pan-sharpened images to achieve reliable detection results. However, recent studies have shown that Deep Learning-based object detection methods are vulnerable to adversarial examples, i.e., adding imperceptible noise to clean images can fool well-trained deep neural networks. It is interesting to combine the pan-sharpening technique with adversarial examples to attack object detectors in remote sensing. In this paper, we propose a framework to generate adversarial pan-sharpened images. Specifically, we propose a two-stream network to generate the pan-sharpened images, and then utilize the shape loss and label loss to perform the attack task. To guarantee the quality of pan-sharpened images, a perceptual loss is utilized to balance spectral preservation and attacking performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can generate effective adversarial pan-sharpened images that maintain a high success rate for white-box attacks and achieve transferability for black-box attacks.