Google's cloudy image recognition is easily blinded, say boffins

Google's Cloud Vision API is easily blinded by the addition of a little noise to the images it analyses, say a trio of researchers from the Network Security Lab at the University of Washington, Seattle. Authors Hossein Hosseini, Baicen Xiao and Radha Poovendran have hit arXiv with a pre-press paper titled Google's Cloud Vision API Is Not Robust To Noise (PDF) that says "In essence, we found that by adding noise, we can always force the API to output wrong labels or to fail to detect any face or text within the image." The authors explain that if one can add different types of noise to an image, the Cloud Vision API will always incorrectly analyse the pictures presented to it. The image at the top of this story (or here for m.reg readers) shows the false results the API returned. It doesn;t need to be a lot of noise: the authors found an average of 14.25 per cent "impulse noise" got the job done.