Differential Newborn Face Morphing Attack Detection using Wavelet Scatter Network

Face Recognition System (FRS) are shown to be vulnerable to morphed images of newborns. Detecting morphing attacks stemming from face images of newborn is important to avoid unwanted consequences, both for security and society. In this paper, we present a new reference-based/Differential Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) method to detect newborn morphing images using Wavelet Scattering Network (WSN). We propose a two-layer WSN with 250 $\times$ 250 pixels and six rotations of wavelets per layer, resulting in 577 paths. The proposed approach is validated on a dataset of 852 bona fide images and 2460 morphing images constructed using face images of 42 unique newborns. The obtained results indicate a gain of over 10\% in detection accuracy over other existing D-MAD techniques.

A Latent Fingerprint in the Wild Database

Latent fingerprints are among the most important and widely used evidence in crime scenes, digital forensics and law enforcement worldwide. Despite the number of advancements reported in recent works, we note that significant open issues such as independent benchmarking and lack of large-scale evaluation databases for improving the algorithms are inadequately addressed. The available databases are mostly of semi-public nature, lack of acquisition in the wild environment, and post-processing pipelines. Moreover, they do not represent a realistic capture scenario similar to real crime scenes, to benchmark the robustness of the algorithms. Further, existing databases for latent fingerprint recognition do not have a large number of unique subjects/fingerprint instances or do not provide ground truth/reference fingerprint images to conduct a cross-comparison against the latent. In this paper, we introduce a new wild large-scale latent fingerprint database that includes five different acquisition scenarios: reference fingerprints from (1) optical and (2) capacitive sensors, (3) smartphone fingerprints, latent fingerprints captured from (4) wall surface, (5) Ipad surface, and (6) aluminium foil surface. The new database consists of 1,318 unique fingerprint instances captured in all above mentioned settings. A total of 2,636 reference fingerprints from optical and capacitive sensors, 1,318 fingerphotos from smartphones, and 9,224 latent fingerprints from each of the 132 subjects were provided in this work. The dataset is constructed considering various age groups, equal representations of genders and backgrounds. In addition, we provide an extensive set of analysis of various subset evaluations to highlight open challenges for future directions in latent fingerprint recognition research.

Learning Pairwise Interaction for Generalizable DeepFake Detection

A fast-paced development of DeepFake generation techniques challenge the detection schemes designed for known type DeepFakes. A reliable Deepfake detection approach must be agnostic to generation types, which can present diverse quality and appearance. Limited generalizability across different generation schemes will restrict the wide-scale deployment of detectors if they fail to handle unseen attacks in an open set scenario. We propose a new approach, Multi-Channel Xception Attention Pairwise Interaction (MCX-API), that exploits the power of pairwise learning and complementary information from different color space representations in a fine-grained manner. We first validate our idea on a publicly available dataset in a intra-class setting (closed set) with four different Deepfake schemes. Further, we report all the results using balanced-open-set-classification (BOSC) accuracy in an inter-class setting (open-set) using three public datasets. Our experiments indicate that our proposed method can generalize better than the state-of-the-art Deepfakes detectors. We obtain 98.48% BOSC accuracy on the FF++ dataset and 90.87% BOSC accuracy on the CelebDF dataset suggesting a promising direction for generalization of DeepFake detection. We further utilize t-SNE and attention maps to interpret and visualize the decision-making process of our proposed network. https://github.com/xuyingzhongguo/MCX-API

SRTGAN: Triplet Loss based Generative Adversarial Network for Real-World Super-Resolution

Many applications such as forensics, surveillance, satellite imaging, medical imaging, etc., demand High-Resolution (HR) images. However, obtaining an HR image is not always possible due to the limitations of optical sensors and their costs. An alternative solution called Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR) is a software-driven approach that aims to take a Low-Resolution (LR) image and obtain the HR image. Most supervised SISR solutions use ground truth HR image as a target and do not include the information provided in the LR image, which could be valuable. In this work, we introduce Triplet Loss-based Generative Adversarial Network hereafter referred as SRTGAN for Image Super-Resolution problem on real-world degradation. We introduce a new triplet-based adversarial loss function that exploits the information provided in the LR image by using it as a negative sample. Allowing the patch-based discriminator with access to both HR and LR images optimizes to better differentiate between HR and LR images; hence, improving the adversary. Further, we propose to fuse the adversarial loss, content loss, perceptual loss, and quality loss to obtain Super-Resolution (SR) image with high perceptual fidelity. We validate the superior performance of the proposed method over the other existing methods on the RealSR dataset in terms of quantitative and qualitative metrics.

Time flies by: Analyzing the Impact of Face Ageing on the Recognition Performance with Synthetic Data

The vast progress in synthetic image synthesis enables the generation of facial images in high resolution and photorealism. In biometric applications, the main motivation for using synthetic data is to solve the shortage of publicly-available biometric data while reducing privacy risks when processing such sensitive information. These advantages are exploited in this work by simulating human face ageing with recent face age modification algorithms to generate mated samples, thereby studying the impact of ageing on the performance of an open-source biometric recognition system. Further, a real dataset is used to evaluate the effects of short-term ageing, comparing the biometric performance to the synthetic domain. The main findings indicate that short-term ageing in the range of 1-5 years has only minor effects on the general recognition performance. However, the correct verification of mated faces with long-term age differences beyond 20 years poses still a significant challenge and requires further investigation.

SYN-MAD 2022: Competition on Face Morphing Attack Detection Based on Privacy-aware Synthetic Training Data

This paper presents a summary of the Competition on Face Morphing Attack Detection Based on Privacy-aware Synthetic Training Data (SYN-MAD) held at the 2022 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2022). The competition attracted a total of 12 participating teams, both from academia and industry and present in 11 different countries. In the end, seven valid submissions were submitted by the participating teams and evaluated by the organizers. The competition was held to present and attract solutions that deal with detecting face morphing attacks while protecting people's privacy for ethical and legal reasons. To ensure this, the training data was limited to synthetic data provided by the organizers. The submitted solutions presented innovations that led to outperforming the considered baseline in many experimental settings. The evaluation benchmark is now available at: https://github.com/marcohuber/SYN-MAD-2022.

A Comprehensive Analysis of AI Biases in DeepFake Detection With Massively Annotated Databases

In recent years, image and video manipulations with DeepFake have become a severe concern for security and society. Therefore, many detection models and databases have been proposed to detect DeepFake data reliably. However, there is an increased concern that these models and training databases might be biased and thus, cause DeepFake detectors to fail. In this work, we tackle these issues by (a) providing large-scale demographic and non-demographic attribute annotations of 41 different attributes for five popular DeepFake datasets and (b) comprehensively analysing AI-bias of multiple state-of-the-art DeepFake detection models on these databases. The investigation analyses the influence of a large variety of distinctive attributes (from over 65M labels) on the detection performance, including demographic (age, gender, ethnicity) and non-demographic (hair, skin, accessories, etc.) information. The results indicate that investigated databases lack diversity and, more importantly, show that the utilised DeepFake detection models are strongly biased towards many investigated attributes. Moreover, the results show that the models' decision-making might be based on several questionable (biased) assumptions, such if a person is smiling or wearing a hat. Depending on the application of such DeepFake detection methods, these biases can lead to generalizability, fairness, and security issues. We hope that the findings of this study and the annotation databases will help to evaluate and mitigate bias in future DeepFake detection techniques. Our annotation datasets are made publicly available.

On the (Limited) Generalization of MasterFace Attacks and Its Relation to the Capacity of Face Representations

A MasterFace is a face image that can successfully match against a large portion of the population. Since their generation does not require access to the information of the enrolled subjects, MasterFace attacks represent a potential security risk for widely-used face recognition systems. Previous works proposed methods for generating such images and demonstrated that these attacks can strongly compromise face recognition. However, previous works followed evaluation settings consisting of older recognition models, limited cross-dataset and cross-model evaluations, and the use of low-scale testing data. This makes it hard to state the generalizability of these attacks. In this work, we comprehensively analyse the generalizability of MasterFace attacks in empirical and theoretical investigations. The empirical investigations include the use of six state-of-the-art FR models, cross-dataset and cross-model evaluation protocols, and utilizing testing datasets of significantly higher size and variance. The results indicate a low generalizability when MasterFaces are training on a different face recognition model than the one used for testing. In these cases, the attack performance is similar to zero-effort imposter attacks. In the theoretical investigations, we define and estimate the face capacity and the maximum MasterFace coverage under the assumption that identities in the face space are well separated. The current trend of increasing the fairness and generalizability in face recognition indicates that the vulnerability of future systems might further decrease. Future works might analyse the utility of MasterFaces for understanding and enhancing the robustness of face recognition models.

Analyzing Human Observer Ability in Morphing Attack Detection -- Where Do We Stand?

While several works have studied the vulnerability of automated FRS and have proposed morphing attack detection (MAD) methods, very few have focused on studying the human ability to detect morphing attacks. The examiner/observer's face morph detection ability is based on their observation, domain knowledge, experience, and familiarity with the problem, and no works report the detailed findings from observers who check identity documents as a part of their everyday professional life. This work creates a new benchmark database of realistic morphing attacks from 48 unique subjects leading to 400 morphed images presented to the observers in a Differential-MAD (D-MAD) setting. Unlike the existing databases, the newly created morphed image database has been created with careful considerations to age, gender and ethnicity to create realistic morph attacks. Further, unlike the previous works, we also capture ten images from Automated Border Control (ABC) gates to mimic the realistic D-MAD setting leading to 400 probe images in border crossing scenarios. The newly created dataset is further used to study the ability of human observers' ability to detect morphed images. In addition, a new dataset of 180 morphed images is also created using the FRGCv2 dataset under the Single Image-MAD (S-MAD) setting. Further, to benchmark the human ability in detecting morphs, a new evaluation platform is created to conduct S-MAD and D-MAD analysis. The benchmark study employs 469 observers for D-MAD and 410 observers for S-MAD who are primarily governmental employees from more than 40 countries. The analysis provides interesting insights and points to expert observers' missing competence and failure to detect a considerable amount of morphing attacks. Human observers tend to detect morphed images to a lower accuracy as compared to the automated MAD algorithms evaluated in this work.

Generation of Non-Deterministic Synthetic Face Datasets Guided by Identity Priors

Enabling highly secure applications (such as border crossing) with face recognition requires extensive biometric performance tests through large scale data. However, using real face images raises concerns about privacy as the laws do not allow the images to be used for other purposes than originally intended. Using representative and subsets of face data can also lead to unwanted demographic biases and cause an imbalance in datasets. One possible solution to overcome these issues is to replace real face images with synthetically generated samples. While generating synthetic images has benefited from recent advancements in computer vision, generating multiple samples of the same synthetic identity resembling real-world variations is still unaddressed, i.e., mated samples. This work proposes a non-deterministic method for generating mated face images by exploiting the well-structured latent space of StyleGAN. Mated samples are generated by manipulating latent vectors, and more precisely, we exploit Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to define semantically meaningful directions in the latent space and control the similarity between the original and the mated samples using a pre-trained face recognition system. We create a new dataset of synthetic face images (SymFace) consisting of 77,034 samples including 25,919 synthetic IDs. Through our analysis using well-established face image quality metrics, we demonstrate the differences in the biometric quality of synthetic samples mimicking characteristics of real biometric data. The analysis and results thereof indicate the use of synthetic samples created using the proposed approach as a viable alternative to replacing real biometric data.