# Threatening Patch Attacks on Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images

Source: [Threatening Patch Attacks on Object Detection in Optical Remote Sensing Images](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa701d1e209131cea49208>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-28T13:57:00.107Z

Authors: Xuxiang Sun, Gong Cheng, Lei Pei, Hongda Li, Junwei Han

Published: 2023-02-13T02:35:49.000Z

## Abstract

Advanced Patch Attacks (PAs) on object detection in natural images have pointed out the great safety vulnerability in methods based on deep neural networks. However, little attention has been paid to this topic in Optical Remote Sensing Images (O-RSIs). To this end, we focus on this research, i.e., PAs on object detection in O-RSIs, and propose a more Threatening PA without the scarification of the visual quality, dubbed TPA. Specifically, to address the problem of inconsistency between local and global landscapes in existing patch selection schemes, we propose leveraging the First-Order Difference (FOD) of the objective function before and after masking to select the sub-patches to be attacked. Further, considering the problem of gradient inundation when applying existing coordinate-based loss to PAs directly, we design an IoU-based objective function specific for PAs, dubbed Bounding box Drifting Loss (BDL), which pushes the detected bounding boxes far from the initial ones until there are no intersections between them. Finally, on two widely used benchmarks, i.e., DIOR and DOTA, comprehensive evaluations of our TPA with four typical detectors (Faster R-CNN, FCOS, RetinaNet, and YOLO-v4) witness its remarkable effectiveness. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to study the PAs on object detection in O-RSIs, and we hope this work can get our readers interested in studying this topic.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.06060>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.06060.pdf>)
