Neural Networks (NNs) have surpassed human accuracy in image classification on ImageNet, yet they often lack robustness against image corruption, i.e., corruption robustness, with such robustness being seemingly effortless for human perception. In this paper, we propose visually-continuous corruption robustness (VCR) - an extension of corruption robustness to allow assessing it over the wide and continuous range of changes that correspond to the human perceptive quality (i.e., from the original image to the full distortion of all perceived visual information), along with two novel human-aware metrics for NN evaluation. To compare VCR of NNs with human perception, we conducted extensive experiments on 14 commonly used image corruptions with 7,718 human participants and state-of-the-art robust NN models with different training objectives (e.g., standard, adversarial, corruption robustness), different architectures (e.g., convolution NNs, vision transformers), and different amounts of training data augmentation. Our study showed that: 1) assessing robustness against continuous corruption can reveal insufficient robustness undetected by existing benchmarks; as a result, 2) the gap between NN and human robustness is larger than previously known; and finally, 3) some image corruptions have a similar impact on human perception, offering opportunities for more cost-effective robustness assessments.

Analyzing reliability of Machine Vision Components (MVC) against scene changes (such as rain or fog) in their operational environment is crucial for safety-critical applications. Safety analysis relies on the availability of precisely specified and, ideally, machine-verifiable requirements. The state-of-the-art reliability framework ICRAF developed machine-verifiable requirements obtained using human performance data. However, ICRAF is limited to analyzing reliability of MVCs solving simple vision tasks, such as image classification. Yet, many real-world safety-critical systems require solving more complex vision tasks, such as object detection and instance segmentation. Fortunately, many complex vision tasks (which we call “c-tasks”) can be represented as a sequence of simple vision subtasks. For instance, object detection can be decomposed as object localization followed by classification. Based on this fact, in this paper, we show that the analysis of c-tasks can also be decomposed as a sequential analysis of their simple subtasks, which allows us to apply existing techniques for analyzing simple vision tasks. Specifically, we propose a modular reliability framework, DecompoVision, that decomposes: (1) the problem of solving a c-task, (2) the reliability requirements, and (3) the reliability analysis, and, as a result, provides deeper insights into MVC reliability. DecompoVision extends ICRAF to handle complex vision tasks and enables reuse of existing artifacts across different c-tasks. We capture new reliability gaps by checking our requirements on 13 widely used object detection MVCs, and, for the first time, benchmark segmentation MVCs.

Machine Vision Components (MVC) are becoming safety-critical. Assuring their quality, including safety, is essential for their successful deployment. Assurance relies on the availability of precisely specified and, ideally, machine-verifiable requirements. MVCs with state-of-the-art performance rely on machine learning (ML) and training data, but largely lack such requirements.