Eroding Trust In Aerial Imagery: Comprehensive Analysis and Evaluation
  Of Adversarial Attacks In Geospatial Systems
Michael Lanier Aayush Dhakal Zhexiao Xiong Arthur Li Nathan Jacobs Yevgeniy Vorobeychik
In critical operations where aerial imagery plays an essential role, the
integrity and trustworthiness of data are paramount. The emergence of
adversarial attacks, particularly those that exploit control over labels or
employ physically feasible trojans, threatens to erode that trust, making the
analysis and mitigation of these attacks a matter of urgency. We demonstrate
how adversarial attacks can degrade confidence in geospatial systems,
specifically focusing on scenarios where the attacker's control over labels is
restricted and the use of realistic threat vectors. Proposing and evaluating
several innovative attack methodologies, including those tailored to overhead
images, we empirically show their threat to remote sensing systems using
high-quality SpaceNet datasets. Our experimentation reflects the unique
challenges posed by aerial imagery, and these preliminary results not only
reveal the potential risks but also highlight the non-trivial nature of the
problem compared to recent works.