Threats to Arabic Handwriting Recognition: Investigating Black-Box Adversarial Attacks on embedded ConvNet models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Khayati, Mohsine EL, Semma, Abdelillah, Courr, Abdelaziz, Elouahbi, Rachid
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Khayati, Mohsine EL
Semma, Abdelillah
Courr, Abdelaziz
Elouahbi, Rachid
author_facet Khayati, Mohsine EL
Semma, Abdelillah
Courr, Abdelaziz
Elouahbi, Rachid
contents Arabic handwriting recognition (AHR) has made significant progress with deep learning models. AHR research has largely focused on performance, with security receiving little attention. This study provides what appears to be a new line of inquiry by demonstrating the vulnerability of high-performing models to adversarial black-box attacks. The focus on black-box attacks reflects real-world scenarios where the attacker has no prior knowledge of the model architecture. Extensive experiments were conducted on two benchmark AHR datasets containing Arabic handwritten Characters. Results demonstrated the effectiveness of the attacks, with the Pixle attack achieving an attack success rate of 99-100\% on most models. Other, less aggressive attacks achieved success rates of 50-96\% across most experiments. Despite the higher attack success rate, the attacks maintain the structural integrity of the characters, rendering them almost imperceptible to the human eye. The findings indicate the higher vulnerability of the studied models to adversarial manipulation. This underscores the need to strengthen efforts to secure these models and ensure their reliability in AHR real-world applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_18058
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Threats to Arabic Handwriting Recognition: Investigating Black-Box Adversarial Attacks on embedded ConvNet models
Khayati, Mohsine EL
Semma, Abdelillah
Courr, Abdelaziz
Elouahbi, Rachid
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Arabic handwriting recognition (AHR) has made significant progress with deep learning models. AHR research has largely focused on performance, with security receiving little attention. This study provides what appears to be a new line of inquiry by demonstrating the vulnerability of high-performing models to adversarial black-box attacks. The focus on black-box attacks reflects real-world scenarios where the attacker has no prior knowledge of the model architecture. Extensive experiments were conducted on two benchmark AHR datasets containing Arabic handwritten Characters. Results demonstrated the effectiveness of the attacks, with the Pixle attack achieving an attack success rate of 99-100\% on most models. Other, less aggressive attacks achieved success rates of 50-96\% across most experiments. Despite the higher attack success rate, the attacks maintain the structural integrity of the characters, rendering them almost imperceptible to the human eye. The findings indicate the higher vulnerability of the studied models to adversarial manipulation. This underscores the need to strengthen efforts to secure these models and ensure their reliability in AHR real-world applications.
title Threats to Arabic Handwriting Recognition: Investigating Black-Box Adversarial Attacks on embedded ConvNet models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18058