Adversarial attack methods based on point manipulation for 3D point cloud classification have revealed the fragility of 3D models, yet the adversarial examples they produce are easily perceived or defended against. The tradeoff between the imperceptibility and adversarial strength leads most point attack methods to inevitably introduce easily detectable outlier points upon a successful attack. An-other promising strategy, shape-based attack, can effectively eliminate outliers, but existing methods often suffer significant reductions in imperceptibility due to irrational deformations. We find that concealing deformation perturbations in areas insensitive to human eyes can achieve a better tradeoff between imperceptibility and adversarial strength, specifically in parts of the object surface that are complex and exhibit drastic curvature changes. Therefore, we propose a novel shape-based adversarial attack method, HiT-ADV, which initially conducts a two-stage search for attack regions based on saliency and imperceptibility scores, and then adds deformation perturbations in each attack region using Gaussian kernel functions. Additionally, HiT-ADV is extendable to physical attack. We propose that by employing benign resampling and benign rigid transformations, we can further enhance physical adversarial strength with little sacrifice to imperceptibility. Extensive experiments have validated the superiority of our method in terms of adversarial and imperceptible properties in both digital and physical spaces. Our code is avaliable at: https://github.com/TRLou/HiT-ADV.

Adversarial attacks have been successfully extended to the field of point clouds. Besides applying the common perturbation guided by the gradient, adversarial attacks on point clouds can be conducted by applying directional perturbations, e.g., along normal and along the tangent plane. In this article, we first investigate whether adversarial attacks with these two orthogonal directional perturbations are more imperceptible than that with the gradient-aware perturbation. Second, we investigate the deeper difference between adversarial attacks with these two directional perturbations, and whether they are applicable to the same scenarios. Third, based on the verification results that the above two directional perturbations have different sensitiveness to curvature, we devise a novel normal-tangent attack (NTA) framework with a hybrid directional perturbation scheme that adaptively chooses the direction according to the curvature of the local shape around the point. Extensive experiments on two publicly available data sets, e.g., ModelNet40 and ShapeNet Part, with classifiers in three representative networks, e.g., PointNet++, DGCNN, PointConv, validate the effectiveness of NTA, and the superiority to the state-of-the-art methods.