Reversing skin cancer adversarial examples by multiscale diffusive and denoising aggregation mechanism

Abstract

Reliable skin cancer diagnosis models play an essential role in early screening and medical intervention. Prevailing computer-aided skin cancer classification systems employ deep learning approaches. However, recent studies reveal their extreme vulnerability to adversarial attacks - often imperceptible perturbations to significantly reduce the performances of skin cancer diagnosis models. To mitigate these threats, this work presents a simple, effective, and resource-efficient defense framework by reverse engineering adversarial perturbations in skin cancer images. Specifically, a multiscale image pyramid is first established to better preserve discriminative structures in the medical imaging domain. To neutralize adversarial effects, skin images at different scales are then progressively diffused by injecting isotropic Gaussian noises to move the adversarial examples to the clean image manifold. Crucially, to further reverse adversarial noises and suppress redundant injected noises, a novel multiscale denoising mechanism is carefully designed that aggregates image information from neighboring scales. We evaluated the defensive effectiveness of our method on ISIC 2019, a largest skin cancer multiclass classification dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can successfully reverse adversarial perturbations from different attacks and significantly outperform some state-of-the-art methods in defending skin cancer diagnosis models.

Keywords: Adversarial defenses; Denoising aggregation; Multiscale diffusive process; Reverse adversarial examples; Robust skin cancer diagnostic model.