Assist Is Just as Important as the Goal: Image Resurfacing to Aid
  Model's Robust Prediction
Abhijith Sharma Phil Munz Apurva Narayan
Adversarial patches threaten visual AI models in the real world. The number
of patches in a patch attack is variable and determines the attack's potency in
a specific environment. Most existing defenses assume a single patch in the
scene, and the multiple patch scenarios are shown to overcome them. This paper
presents a model-agnostic defense against patch attacks based on total
variation for image resurfacing (TVR). The TVR is an image-cleansing method
that processes images to remove probable adversarial regions. TVR can be
utilized solely or augmented with a defended model, providing multi-level
security for robust prediction. TVR nullifies the influence of patches in a
single image scan with no prior assumption on the number of patches in the
scene. We validate TVR on the ImageNet-Patch benchmark dataset and with
real-world physical objects, demonstrating its ability to mitigate patch
attack.