Robust Machine Learning In Computer Vision

Deep neural networks have been shown to be successful in various computer vision tasks such as image classification and object detection. Although deep neural networks have exceeded human performance in many tasks, robustness and reliability are always the concerns of using deep learning models. On the one hand, degraded images and videos aggravate the performance of computer vision tasks. On the other hand, if the deep neural networks are under adversarial attacks, the networks can be broken completely. Motivated by the vulnerability of deep neural networks, I analyze and develop image restoration and adversarial defense algorithms towards a vision of robust machine learning in computer vision. In this dissertation, I study two types of degradation making deep neural networks vulnerable. The first part of the dissertation focuses on face recognition at long range, whose performance is severely degraded by atmospheric turbulence. The theme is on improving the performance and robustness of various tasks in face recognition systems such as facial keypoints localization, feature extraction, and image restoration. The second part focuses on defending adversarial attacks in the images classification task. The theme is on exploring adversarial defense methods that can achieve good performance in standard accuracy, robustness to adversarial attacks with known threat models, and good generalization to other unseen attacks