Manifold Projection for Adversarial Defense on Face Recognition

Although deep convolutional neural network based face recognition system has achieved remarkable success, it is susceptible to adversarial images: carefully constructed imperceptible perturbations can easily mislead deep neural networks. A recent study has shown that in addition to regular off-manifold adversarial images, there are also adversarial images on the manifold. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Variational AutoEncoder (A-VAE), a novel framework to tackle both types of attacks. We hypothesize that both off-manifold and on-manifold attacks move the image away from the high probability region of image manifold. We utilize variational autoencoder (VAE) to estimate the lower bound of the log-likelihood of image and explore to project the input images back into the high probability regions of image manifold again. At inference time, our model synthesizes multiple similar realizations of a given image by random sampling, then the nearest neighbor of the given image is selected as the final input of the face recognition model. As a preprocessing operation, our method is attack-agnostic and can adapt to a wide range of resolutions. The experimental results on LFW demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art defense success rate against conventional off-manifold attacks such as FGSM, PGD, and C&W under both grey-box and white-box settings, and even on-manifold attack.