Quality-Preserving Imperceptible Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition

Ziyi Chang, Kanglei Zhou, Xiaohui Liang and Hubert P. H. Shum
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), 2026

Impact Factor: 11.1Top 10% Journal in Engineering, Electrical & Electronic

Quality-Preserving Imperceptible Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition

Abstract

Adversarial attacks on skeletal human action recognition have received significant attention. However, existing methods typically introduce noise-like perturbations that degrade motion quality post-attack, and thereby are inherently perceptible with recent advancements in S-HAR systems. We discover that this degradation stems from the gap between empirical and true risks during the optimization process of previous adversarial attacks. To address this issue, we propose an attack where adversarial motions are obtained without compromising their motion quality. To minimize the risk gap and preserve motion quality, we propose a distribution-based adversarial attack method without introducing noise-like perturbations. To faithfully evaluate the motion quality, we propose a new metric that aligns with human perception on real-world naturalness. Experiments have been conducted on the state-of-the-art S-HAR methods across two datasets, demonstrating the superiority of our method in both the attack success rate and the post-attack motion quality through qualitative and quantitative analyses. The success of our quality-preserving attack application and distribution-based method raises serious concerns about the robustness of action recognizers, highlighting the need for further enhancements in this domain.


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Plain Text

Ziyi Chang, Kanglei Zhou, Xiaohui Liang and Hubert P. H. Shum, "Quality-Preserving Imperceptible Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition," IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 2026.

BibTeX

@article{chang26quality,
 author={Chang, Ziyi and Zhou, Kanglei and Liang, Xiaohui and Shum, Hubert P. H.},
 journal={IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology},
 title={Quality-Preserving Imperceptible Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition},
 year={2026},
}

RIS

TY  - JOUR
AU  - Chang, Ziyi
AU  - Zhou, Kanglei
AU  - Liang, Xiaohui
AU  - Shum, Hubert P. H.
T2  - IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
TI  - Quality-Preserving Imperceptible Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition
PY  - 2026
ER  - 


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