Frequency Domain Distributed Perturbations: Towards Query-Efficient Black-Box Adversarial Video Attack

In recent years, adversarial attacks on video recognition models have attracted increasing attention. However, most existing strategies are extensions of image-based methods, where adversarial perturbations are computed independently and embedded into individual frames. This independent per-frame perturbation process wastes computational resources and leads to excessive query consumption. To address this problem, we introduce Frequency Domain Distributed Perturbations (FDP), a straightforward yet effective black-box video attack method using temporal correlations between video frames. Specifically, FDP first converts the input video into the frequency domain and calculates globally coordinated adversarial perturbations in the spectral space. By conducting global optimization in the frequency domain, FDP improves the effectiveness of each query, significantly decreasing the total number of queries needed. The resulting perturbations are temporally distributed across frames to preserve the spatiotemporal structure. Furthermore, we introduce a frequency-sensitive mask to identify the spectral regions most critical to the model's predictions. By applying perturbations only to these key frequency bands, FDP further reduces the perturbation search space and improves query efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly reduces query consumption while achieving higher attack success rates than state-of-the-art approaches.