  Recent analysis of deep neural networks has revealed their vulnerability to
carefully structured adversarial examples. Many effective algorithms exist to
craft these adversarial examples, but performant defenses seem to be far away.
In this work, we explore the use of edge-aware bilateral filtering as a
projection back to the space of natural images. We show that bilateral
filtering is an effective defense in multiple attack settings, where the
strength of the adversary gradually increases. In the case of an adversary who
has no knowledge of the defense, bilateral filtering can remove more than 90%
of adversarial examples from a variety of different attacks. To evaluate
against an adversary with complete knowledge of our defense, we adapt the
bilateral filter as a trainable layer in a neural network and show that adding
this layer makes ImageNet images significantly more robust to attacks. When
trained under a framework of adversarial training, we show that the resulting
model is hard to fool with even the best attack methods.
