From Characters to Chaos: On the Feasibility of Attacking Thai OCR with Adversarial Examples

Recent advances in deep neural networks (DNNs) have significantly enhanced the capabilities of optical character recognition (OCR) technology, enabling its adoption to a wide range of real-world applications. Despite this success, DNN-based OCR is shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, in which the adversary can influence the DNN model’s prediction by carefully manipulating input to the model. Prior work has demonstrated the security impacts of adversarial attacks on various OCR languages. However, to date, no studies have been conducted and evaluated on an OCR system tailored to the Thai language. To bridge this gap, this work presents a feasibility study of performing adversarial attacks on a specific Thai OCR application – Thai License Plate Recognition (LPR). Moreover, we propose a new type of adversarial attacks based on the semi-targeted scenario and show that this scenario is highly realistic in LPR applications. Our experimental results show the feasibility of our attacks as they can be performed on a commodity computer desktop with over 90% attack success rate.