This paper shows the susceptibility of spectrogram-based audio classifiers to
adversarial attacks and the transferability of such attacks to audio waveforms.
Some commonly used adversarial attacks to images have been applied to
Mel-frequency and short-time Fourier transform spectrograms, and such perturbed
spectrograms are able to fool a 2D convolutional neural network (CNN). Such
attacks produce perturbed spectrograms that are visually imperceptible by
humans. Furthermore, the audio waveforms reconstructed from the perturbed
spectrograms are also able to fool a 1D CNN trained on the original audio.
Experimental results on a dataset of western music have shown that the 2D CNN
achieves up to 81.87% of mean accuracy on legitimate examples and such
performance drops to 12.09% on adversarial examples. Likewise, the 1D CNN
achieves up to 78.29% of mean accuracy on original audio samples and such
performance drops to 27.91% on adversarial audio waveforms reconstructed from
the perturbed spectrograms.