Deep Neural Networks(DNN) have excessively advanced the field of computer
vision by achieving state of the art performance in various vision tasks. These
results are not limited to the field of vision but can also be seen in speech
recognition and machine translation tasks. Recently, DNNs are found to poorly
fail when tested with samples that are crafted by making imperceptible changes
to the original input images. This causes a gap between the validation and
adversarial performance of a DNN. An effective and generalizable robustness
metric for evaluating the performance of DNN on these adversarial inputs is
still missing from the literature. In this paper, we propose Noise Sensitivity
Score (NSS), a metric that quantifies the performance of a DNN on a specific
input under different forms of fix-directional attacks. An insightful
mathematical explanation is provided for deeply understanding the proposed
metric. By leveraging the NSS, we also proposed a skewness based dataset
robustness metric for evaluating a DNN's adversarial performance on a given
dataset. Extensive experiments using widely used state of the art architectures
along with popular classification datasets, such as MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100,
and ImageNet, are used to validate the effectiveness and generalization of our
proposed metrics. Instead of simply measuring a DNN's adversarial robustness in
the input domain, as previous works, the proposed NSS is built on top of
insightful mathematical understanding of the adversarial attack and gives a
more explicit explanation of the robustness.