Arc2Morph: Identity-Preserving Facial Morphing with Arc2Face

Face morphing attacks are widely recognized as one of the most challenging threats to face recognition systems used in electronic identity documents. These attacks exploit a critical vulnerability in passport enrollment procedures adopted by many countries, where the facial image is often acquired without a supervised live capture process. In this paper, we propose a novel face morphing technique based on Arc2Face, an identity-conditioned face foundation model capable of synthesizing photorealistic facial images from compact identity representations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by comparing the morphing attack potential metric on two large-scale sequestered face morphing attack detection datasets against several state-of-the-art morphing methods, as well as on two novel morphed face datasets derived from FEI and ONOT. Experimental results show that the proposed deep learning-based approach achieves a morphing attack potential comparable to that of landmark-based techniques, which have traditionally been regarded as the most challenging. These findings confirm the ability of the proposed method to effectively preserve and manage identity information during the morph generation process.

DFIC: Towards a balanced facial image dataset for automatic ICAO compliance verification

Ensuring compliance with ISO/IEC and ICAO standards for facial images in machine-readable travel documents (MRTDs) is essential for reliable identity verification, but current manual inspection methods are inefficient in high-demand environments. This paper introduces the DFIC dataset, a novel comprehensive facial image dataset comprising around 58,000 annotated images and 2706 videos of more than 1000 subjects, that cover a broad range of non-compliant conditions, in addition to compliant portraits. Our dataset provides a more balanced demographic distribution than the existing public datasets, with one partition that is nearly uniformly distributed, facilitating the development of automated ICAO compliance verification methods. Using DFIC, we fine-tuned a novel method that heavily relies on spatial attention mechanisms for the automatic validation of ICAO compliance requirements, and we have compared it with the state-of-the-art aimed at ICAO compliance verification, demonstrating improved results. DFIC dataset is now made public (https://github.com/visteam-isr-uc/DFIC) for the training and validation of new models, offering an unprecedented diversity of faces, that will improve both robustness and adaptability to the intrinsically diverse combinations of faces and props that can be presented to the validation system. These results emphasize the potential of DFIC to enhance automated ICAO compliance methods but it can also be used in many other applications that aim to improve the security, privacy, and fairness of facial recognition systems.

Design, Development, and Use of Maya Robot as an Assistant for the Therapy/Education of Children with Cancer: a Pilot Study

This study centers around the design and implementation of the Maya Robot, a portable elephant-shaped social robot, intended to engage with children undergoing cancer treatment. Initial efforts were devoted to enhancing the robot's facial expression recognition accuracy, achieving a 98% accuracy through deep neural networks. Two subsequent preliminary exploratory experiments were designed to advance the study's objectives. The first experiment aimed to compare pain levels experienced by children during the injection process, with and without the presence of the Maya robot. Twenty-five children, aged 4 to 9, undergoing cancer treatment participated in this counterbalanced study. The paired T-test results revealed a significant reduction in perceived pain when the robot was actively present in the injection room. The second experiment sought to assess perspectives of hospitalized children and their mothers during engagement with Maya through a game. Forty participants, including 20 children aged 4 to 9 and their mothers, were involved. Post Human-Maya Interactions, UTAUT questionnaire results indicated that children experienced significantly less anxiety than their parents during the interaction and game play. Notably, children exhibited higher trust levels in both the robot and the games, presenting a statistically significant difference in trust levels compared to their parents (P-value < 0.05). This preliminary exploratory study highlights the positive impact of utilizing Maya as an assistant for therapy/education in a clinical setting, particularly benefiting children undergoing cancer treatment. The findings underscore the potential of social robots in pediatric healthcare contexts, emphasizing improved pain management and emotional well-being among young patients.

PriorProbe: Recovering Individual-Level Priors for Personalizing Neural Networks in Facial Expression Recognition

Incorporating individual-level cognitive priors offers an important route to personalizing neural networks, yet accurately eliciting such priors remains challenging: existing methods either fail to uniquely identify them or introduce systematic biases. Here, we introduce PriorProbe, a novel elicitation approach grounded in Markov Chain Monte Carlo with People that recovers fine-grained, individual-specific priors. Focusing on a facial expression recognition task, we apply PriorProbe to individual participants and test whether integrating the recovered priors with a state-of-the-art neural network improves its ability to predict an individual's classification on ambiguous stimuli. The PriorProbe-derived priors yield substantial performance gains, outperforming both the neural network alone and alternative sources of priors, while preserving the network's inference on ground-truth labels. Together, these results demonstrate that PriorProbe provides a general and interpretable framework for personalizing deep neural networks.

Revisiting Emotions Representation for Recognition in the Wild

Facial emotion recognition has been typically cast as a single-label classification problem of one out of six prototypical emotions. However, that is an oversimplification that is unsuitable for representing the multifaceted spectrum of spontaneous emotional states, which are most often the result of a combination of multiple emotions contributing at different intensities. Building on this, a promising direction that was explored recently is to cast emotion recognition as a distribution learning problem. Still, such approaches are limited in that research datasets are typically annotated with a single emotion class. In this paper, we contribute a novel approach to describe complex emotional states as probability distributions over a set of emotion classes. To do so, we propose a solution to automatically re-label existing datasets by exploiting the result of a study in which a large set of both basic and compound emotions is mapped to probability distributions in the Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) space. In this way, given a face image annotated with VAD values, we can estimate the likelihood of it belonging to each of the distributions, so that emotional states can be described as a mixture of emotions, enriching their description, while also accounting for the ambiguous nature of their perception. In a preliminary set of experiments, we illustrate the advantages of this solution and a new possible direction of investigation. Data annotations are available at https://github.com/jbcnrlz/affectnet-b-annotation.

SHaSaM: Submodular Hard Sample Mining for Fair Facial Attribute Recognition

Deep neural networks often inherit social and demographic biases from annotated data during model training, leading to unfair predictions, especially in the presence of sensitive attributes like race, age, gender etc. Existing methods fall prey to the inherent data imbalance between attribute groups and inadvertently emphasize on sensitive attributes, worsening unfairness and performance. To surmount these challenges, we propose SHaSaM (Submodular Hard Sample Mining), a novel combinatorial approach that models fairness-driven representation learning as a submodular hard-sample mining problem. Our two-stage approach comprises of SHaSaM-MINE, which introduces a submodular subset selection strategy to mine hard positives and negatives - effectively mitigating data imbalance, and SHaSaM-LEARN, which introduces a family of combinatorial loss functions based on Submodular Conditional Mutual Information to maximize the decision boundary between target classes while minimizing the influence of sensitive attributes. This unified formulation restricts the model from learning features tied to sensitive attributes, significantly enhancing fairness without sacrificing performance. Experiments on CelebA and UTKFace demonstrate that SHaSaM achieves state-of-the-art results, with up to 2.7 points improvement in model fairness (Equalized Odds) and a 3.5% gain in Accuracy, within fewer epochs as compared to existing methods.

SIDeR: Semantic Identity Decoupling for Unrestricted Face Privacy

With the deep integration of facial recognition into online banking, identity verification, and other networked services, achieving effective decoupling of identity information from visual representations during image storage and transmission has become a critical challenge for privacy protection. To address this issue, we propose SIDeR, a Semantic decoupling-driven framework for unrestricted face privacy protection. SIDeR decomposes a facial image into a machine-recognizable identity feature vector and a visually perceptible semantic appearance component. By leveraging semantic-guided recomposition in the latent space of a diffusion model, it generates visually anonymous adversarial faces while maintaining machine-level identity consistency. The framework incorporates momentum-driven unrestricted perturbation optimization and a semantic-visual balancing factor to synthesize multiple visually diverse, highly natural adversarial samples. Furthermore, for authorized access, the protected image can be restored to its original form when the correct password is provided. Extensive experiments on the CelebA-HQ and FFHQ datasets demonstrate that SIDeR achieves a 99% attack success rate in black-box scenarios and outperforms baseline methods by 41.28% in PSNR-based restoration quality.

Uncertainty-Aware Multimodal Emotion Recognition through Dirichlet Parameterization

In this work, we present a lightweight and privacy-preserving Multimodal Emotion Recognition (MER) framework designed for deployment on edge devices. To demonstrate framework's versatility, our implementation uses three modalities - speech, text and facial imagery. However, the system is fully modular, and can be extended to support other modalities or tasks. Each modality is processed through a dedicated backbone optimized for inference efficiency: Emotion2Vec for speech, a ResNet-based model for facial expressions, and DistilRoBERTa for text. To reconcile uncertainty across modalities, we introduce a model- and task-agnostic fusion mechanism grounded in Dempster-Shafer theory and Dirichlet evidence. Operating directly on model logits, this approach captures predictive uncertainty without requiring additional training or joint distribution estimation, making it broadly applicable beyond emotion recognition. Validation on five benchmark datasets (eNTERFACE05, MEAD, MELD, RAVDESS and CREMA-D) show that our method achieves competitive accuracy while remaining computationally efficient and robust to ambiguous or missing inputs. Overall, the proposed framework emphasizes modularity, scalability, and real-world feasibility, paving the way toward uncertainty-aware multimodal systems for healthcare, human-computer interaction, and other emotion-informed applications.

Fine-Grained Cat Breed Recognition with Global Context Vision Transformer

Accurate identification of cat breeds from images is a challenging task due to subtle differences in fur patterns, facial structure, and color. In this paper, we present a deep learning-based approach for classifying cat breeds using a subset of the Oxford-IIIT Pet Dataset, which contains high-resolution images of various domestic breeds. We employed the Global Context Vision Transformer (GCViT) architecture-tiny for cat breed recognition. To improve model generalization, we used extensive data augmentation, including rotation, horizontal flipping, and brightness adjustment. Experimental results show that the GCViT-Tiny model achieved a test accuracy of 92.00% and validation accuracy of 94.54%. These findings highlight the effectiveness of transformer-based architectures for fine-grained image classification tasks. Potential applications include veterinary diagnostics, animal shelter management, and mobile-based breed recognition systems. We also provide a hugging face demo at https://huggingface.co/spaces/bfarhad/cat-breed-classifier.

Facial Emotion Recognition on FER-2013 using an EfficientNetB2-Based Approach

Detection of human emotions based on facial images in real-world scenarios is a difficult task due to low image quality, variations in lighting, pose changes, background distractions, small inter-class variations, noisy crowd-sourced labels, and severe class imbalance, as observed in the FER-2013 dataset of 48x48 grayscale images. Although recent approaches using large CNNs such as VGG and ResNet achieve reasonable accuracy, they are computationally expensive and memory-intensive, limiting their practicality for real-time applications. We address these challenges using a lightweight and efficient facial emotion recognition pipeline based on EfficientNetB2, trained using a two-stage warm-up and fine-tuning strategy. The model is enhanced with AdamW optimization, decoupled weight decay, label smoothing (epsilon = 0.06) to reduce annotation noise, and clipped class weights to mitigate class imbalance, along with dropout, mixed-precision training, and extensive real-time data augmentation. The model is trained using a stratified 87.5%/12.5% train-validation split while keeping the official test set intact, achieving a test accuracy of 68.78% with nearly ten times fewer parameters than VGG16-based baselines. Experimental results, including per-class metrics and learning dynamics, demonstrate stable training and strong generalization, making the proposed approach suitable for real-time and edge-based applications.