Image-Level Adaptive Adversarial Ranking for Person Re-Identification

The potential vulnerability of deep neural networks and the complexity of pedestrian images, greatly limits the application of person re-identification techniques in the field of smart security. Current attack methods often focus on generating carefully crafted adversarial samples or only disrupting the metric distances between targets and similar pedestrians. However, both aspects are crucial for evaluating the security of methods adapted for person re-identification tasks. For this reason, we propose an image-level adaptive adversarial ranking method that comprehensively considers two aspects to adapt to changes in pedestrians in the real world and effectively evaluate the robustness of models in adversarial environments. To generate more refined adversarial samples, our image representation enhancement module leverages channel-wise information entropy, assigning varying weights to different channels to produce images with richer information content, along with a generative adversarial network to create adversarial samples. Subsequently, for adaptive perturbation of ranking, the adaptive weight confusion ranking loss is presented to calculate the weights of distances between positive or negative samples and query samples. It endeavors to push positive samples away from query samples and bring negative samples closer, thereby interfering with the ranking of system. Notably, this method requires no additional hyperparameter tuning or extra data training, making it an adaptive attack strategy. Experimental results on large-scale datasets such as Market1501, CUHK03, and DukeMTMC demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in attacking ReID systems.