Deep product quantization network (DPQN) has recently received much attention in fast image retrieval tasks due to its efficiency of encoding high-dimensional visual features especially when dealing with large-scale datasets. Recent studies show that deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to input with small and maliciously designed perturbations (a.k.a., adversarial examples). This phenomenon raises the concern of security issues for DPQN in the testing/deploying stage as well. However, little effort has been devoted to investigating how adversarial examples affect DPQN. To this end, we propose product quantization adversarial generation (PQ-AG), a simple yet effective method to generate adversarial examples for product quantization based retrieval systems. PQ-AG aims to generate imperceptible adversarial perturbations for query images to form adversarial queries, whose nearest neighbors from a targeted product quantizaiton model are not semantically related to those from the original queries. Extensive experiments show that our PQ-AQ successfully creates adversarial examples to mislead targeted product quantization retrieval models. Besides, we found that our PQ-AG significantly degrades retrieval performance in both white-box and black-box settings.
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