  This work systematically investigates the adversarial robustness of deep
image denoisers (DIDs), i.e, how well DIDs can recover the ground truth from
noisy observations degraded by adversarial perturbations. Firstly, to evaluate
DIDs' robustness, we propose a novel adversarial attack, namely
Observation-based Zero-mean Attack ({\sc ObsAtk}), to craft adversarial
zero-mean perturbations on given noisy images. We find that existing DIDs are
vulnerable to the adversarial noise generated by {\sc ObsAtk}. Secondly, to
robustify DIDs, we propose an adversarial training strategy, hybrid adversarial
training ({\sc HAT}), that jointly trains DIDs with adversarial and
non-adversarial noisy data to ensure that the reconstruction quality is high
and the denoisers around non-adversarial data are locally smooth. The resultant
DIDs can effectively remove various types of synthetic and adversarial noise.
We also uncover that the robustness of DIDs benefits their generalization
capability on unseen real-world noise. Indeed, {\sc HAT}-trained DIDs can
recover high-quality clean images from real-world noise even without training
on real noisy data. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, including
Set68, PolyU, and SIDD, corroborate the effectiveness of {\sc ObsAtk} and {\sc
HAT}.

Image and Video Processing;Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition;Machine Learning