A Simple Sticker Tricked Neural Networks Into Classifying Anything as a Toaster

Image recognition technology may be sophisticated, but it is also easily duped. Researchers have fooled algorithms into confusing two skiers for a dog, a baseball for espresso, and a turtle for a rifle. But a new method of deceiving the machines is simple and far-reaching, involving just a humble sticker. Google researchers developed a psychedelic sticker that, when placed in an unrelated image, tricks deep learning systems into classifying the image as a toaster. According to a recently submitted research paper about the attack, this adversarial patch is "scene-independent," meaning someone could deploy it "without prior knowledge of the lighting conditions, camera angle, type of classifier being attacked, or even the other items within the scene."