Unveiling the Two-Faced Truth: Disentangling Morphed Identities for Face Morphing Detection

Morphing attacks keep threatening biometric systems, especially face recognition systems. Over time they have become simpler to perform and more realistic, as such, the usage of deep learning systems to detect these attacks has grown. At the same time, there is a constant concern regarding the lack of interpretability of deep learning models. Balancing performance and interpretability has been a difficult task for scientists. However, by leveraging domain information and proving some constraints, we have been able to develop IDistill, an interpretable method with state-of-the-art performance that provides information on both the identity separation on morph samples and their contribution to the final prediction. The domain information is learnt by an autoencoder and distilled to a classifier system in order to teach it to separate identity information. When compared to other methods in the literature it outperforms them in three out of five databases and is competitive in the remaining.

OrthoMAD: Morphing Attack Detection Through Orthogonal Identity Disentanglement

Morphing attacks are one of the many threats that are constantly affecting deep face recognition systems. It consists of selecting two faces from different individuals and fusing them into a final image that contains the identity information of both. In this work, we propose a novel regularisation term that takes into account the existent identity information in both and promotes the creation of two orthogonal latent vectors. We evaluate our proposed method (OrthoMAD) in five different types of morphing in the FRLL dataset and evaluate the performance of our model when trained on five distinct datasets. With a small ResNet-18 as the backbone, we achieve state-of-the-art results in the majority of the experiments, and competitive results in the others. The code of this paper will be publicly available.

Explainable Biometrics in the Age of Deep Learning

Systems capable of analyzing and quantifying human physical or behavioral traits, known as biometrics systems, are growing in use and application variability. Since its evolution from handcrafted features and traditional machine learning to deep learning and automatic feature extraction, the performance of biometric systems increased to outstanding values. Nonetheless, the cost of this fast progression is still not understood. Due to its opacity, deep neural networks are difficult to understand and analyze, hence, hidden capacities or decisions motivated by the wrong motives are a potential risk. Researchers have started to pivot their focus towards the understanding of deep neural networks and the explanation of their predictions. In this paper, we provide a review of the current state of explainable biometrics based on the study of 47 papers and discuss comprehensively the direction in which this field should be developed.

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 survey on attention mechanisms for medical applications: are we moving towards better algorithms?

The increasing popularity of attention mechanisms in deep learning algorithms for computer vision and natural language processing made these models attractive to other research domains. In healthcare, there is a strong need for tools that may improve the routines of the clinicians and the patients. Naturally, the use of attention-based algorithms for medical applications occurred smoothly. However, being healthcare a domain that depends on high-stake decisions, the scientific community must ponder if these high-performing algorithms fit the needs of medical applications. With this motto, this paper extensively reviews the use of attention mechanisms in machine learning (including Transformers) for several medical applications. This work distinguishes itself from its predecessors by proposing a critical analysis of the claims and potentialities of attention mechanisms presented in the literature through an experimental case study on medical image classification with three different use cases. These experiments focus on the integrating process of attention mechanisms into established deep learning architectures, the analysis of their predictive power, and a visual assessment of their saliency maps generated by post-hoc explanation methods. This paper concludes with a critical analysis of the claims and potentialities presented in the literature about attention mechanisms and proposes future research lines in medical applications that may benefit from these frameworks.