Targeted Attack and Defense for Deep Hashing

Deep hashing methods have been intensively studied and successfully applied in massive fast image retrieval. However, inherited from the deficiency of deep neural networks, deep hashing models can be easily fooled by adversarial examples, which brings a serious security risk to hashing based retrieval. In this paper, we propose a novel targeted attack method and the first defense scheme for deep hashing based retrieval. Specifically, a simple yet effective PrototypeNet is designed to generate category-level semantic embedding (dubbed prototype code) regarded as the semantic representative of the target label, which preserves the semantic similarity with relevant labels and dissimilarity with irrelevant labels. Subsequently, we conduct the targeted attack by minimizing the Hamming distance between the hash code of the adversarial sample and the prototype code. Moreover, we provide an adversarial training algorithm to improve the adversarial robustness of deep hashing networks. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method can produce high-quality adversarial samples with the benefit of superior targeted attack performance over state-of-the-arts. Importantly, our adversarial defense framework can significantly boost the robustness of hashing networks against adversarial attacks on deep hashing based retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/xunguangwang/Targeted-Attack-and-Defense-for-Deep-Hashing.