Current machine learning systems are not designed to defend against malevolent adversaries. Some teams succeeded already to fool image recognition or voice recognition. Three researchers from the University of Washington fooled the Google’s video tagging system. Google offers a Cloud Video Intelligence API that returns the most relevant tags of a video sequence. It is based on deep learning.

The idea of the researchers is simple. They insert the same image every 50 frames in the video. The API returns the tags related to the added image (with an over 90% high confidence) rather than the tags related to the forged video sequence. Thus, rather than returning tiger for the video (98% of the video time), the API returns Audi.

It has never been demonstrated that subliminal images are effective on people. This team demonstrated that subliminal images can be effective on Machine Learning. This attack has many interesting uses.

This short paper is interesting to read. Testing this attack on other APIs would be interesting.

Hossein, Hosseini, Baicen Xiao, and Radha Poovendran. “Deceiving Google’s Cloud Video Intelligence API Built for Summarizing Videos.” arXiv, March 31, 2017. https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.09793