An Integrated Algorithm for Robust and Imperceptible Audio Adversarial
  Examples
Armin Ettenhofer Jan-Philipp Schulze Karla Pizzi
Audio adversarial examples are audio files that have been manipulated to fool
an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, while still sounding benign to a
human listener. Most methods to generate such samples are based on a two-step
algorithm: first, a viable adversarial audio file is produced, then, this is
fine-tuned with respect to perceptibility and robustness. In this work, we
present an integrated algorithm that uses psychoacoustic models and room
impulse responses (RIR) in the generation step. The RIRs are dynamically
created by a neural network during the generation process to simulate a
physical environment to harden our examples against transformations experienced
in over-the-air attacks. We compare the different approaches in three
experiments: in a simulated environment and in a realistic over-the-air
scenario to evaluate the robustness, and in a human study to evaluate the
perceptibility. Our algorithms considering psychoacoustics only or in addition
to the robustness show an improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as
well as in the human perception study, at the cost of an increased word error
rate (WER).