  Neural network image classifiers are known to be vulnerable to adversarial
images, i.e., natural images which have been modified by an adversarial
perturbation specifically designed to be imperceptible to humans yet fool the
classifier. Not only can adversarial images be generated easily, but these
images will often be adversarial for networks trained on disjoint subsets of
data or with different architectures. Adversarial images represent a potential
security risk as well as a serious machine learning challenge---it is clear
that vulnerable neural networks perceive images very differently from humans.
Noting that virtually every image classification data set is composed of JPG
images, we evaluate the effect of JPG compression on the classification of
adversarial images. For Fast-Gradient-Sign perturbations of small magnitude, we
found that JPG compression often reverses the drop in classification accuracy
to a large extent, but not always. As the magnitude of the perturbations
increases, JPG recompression alone is insufficient to reverse the effect.
