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Morph detection is of paramount significance when the integrity of Automatic Face Recognition (AFR) systems are concerned. Considering the risks incurred by morphing attacks, a robust automated morph detector is required which can distinguish authentic bona fide samples from altered morphed images. We leverage the wavelet sub-band decomposition of an input image, yielding the fine-grained spatial-frequency content of the input image. To enhance the detection of morphed images, our goal is to find the most discriminative information across frequency channels and spatial domain. To this end, we propose an end-to-end attention-based deep morph detector which assimilates the most discriminative wavelet sub-bands of a given image which are obtained by a group sparsity representation learning scheme. Specifically, our group sparsity-constrained Deep Neural Network (DNN) learns the most discriminative wavelet sub-bands (channels) of an input image while the attention mechanism captures the most discriminative spatial regions of input images for the downstream task of morph detection. To this end, we adopt three attention mechanisms to diversify our refined features for morph detection. As the first attention mechanism, we employ the Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) which provides us with refined feature maps. As the second attention mechanism, compatibility scores across spatial locationsmore »and output of our DNN highlight the most discriminative regions, and lastly, the multiheaded self-attention augmented convolutions account for our third attention mechanism. We evaluate the efficiency of our proposed framework through extensive experiments using multiple morph datasets that are compiled using bona fide images available in the FERET, FRLL, FRGC, and WVU Twin datasets. Most importantly, our proposed methodology has resulted in a reduction in detection error rates when compared with state-of-the-art results. Finally, to further assess our multi-attentional morph detection, we delve into different combinations of attention mechanisms via a comprehensive ablation study.« less

A morph is an image of an ambiguous subject generated by combining multiple individuals. The morphed image can be submitted to a facial recognition system and erroneously verified with the contributing bad actors. When submitted as a passport image, a morphed face poses a national security threat because a passport can then be shared between the individuals. As morphed images become easier to generate, it is vital that the research community expands available datasets in order to contentiously improve current technology. Children are a challenging paradigm for facial recognition systems and morphing children takes advantage of this disparity. In this paper, we morph juvenile faces in order to create a unique, high-quality dataset to challenge FRS. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on the generation and evaluation of juvenile morphed faces. The evaluation of the generated morphed juvenile dataset is performed in terms of vulnerability analysis and presentation attack error rates.

Morph images threaten Facial Recognition Systems (FRS) by presenting as multiple individuals, allowing an adversary to swap identities with another subject. Morph generation using generative adversarial networks (GANs) results in high-quality morphs unaffected by the spatial artifacts caused by landmark-based methods, but there is an apparent loss in identity with standard GAN-based morphing methods. In this paper, we propose a novel StyleGAN morph generation technique by introducing a landmark enforcement method to resolve this issue. Considering this method, we aim to enforce the landmarks of the morphed image to represent the spatial average of the landmarks of the bona fide faces and subsequently the morph images to inherit the geometric identity of both bona fide faces. Exploration of the latent space of our model is conducted using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to accentuate the effect of both the bona fide faces on the morphed latent representation and address the identity loss issue with latent domain averaging. Additionally, to improve high frequency reconstruction in the morphs, we study the train-ability of the noise input for the StyleGAN2 model.

Although a substantial amount of studies is dedicated to morphing detection, most of them fail to generalize for morph faces outside of their training paradigm. Moreover, recent morph detection methods are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. In this paper, we intend to learn a morph detection model with high generalization to a wide range of morphing attacks and high robustness against different adversarial attacks. To this aim, we develop an ensemble of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and Transformer models to benefit from their capabilities simultaneously. To improve the robust accuracy of the ensemble model, we employ multi-perturbation adversarial training and generate adversarial examples with high transferability for several single models. Our exhaustive evaluations demonstrate that the proposed robust ensemble model generalizes to several morphing attacks and face datasets. In addition, we validate that our robust ensemble model gains better robustness against several adversarial attacks while outperforming the state-of-the-art studies.

By combining two or more face images of look-alikes, morphed face images are generated to fool Facial Recognition Systems (FRS) into falsely accepting multiple people, leading to failures in security systems. Despite several attempts in the literature, finding pairs of bona fide faces to generate the morphed images is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we morph identical twin pairs to generate extremely difficult morphs for FRS. We first explore three methods of morphed face generation, GAN-based, landmark-based, and a wavelet-based morphing approach. We leverage these methods to generate morphs from the identical twin pairs that retain high similarity to both subjects while resulting in minimal artifacts in the visual domain. To further improve the difficulty of recognizing morphed face images, we perform an ablation study to apply adversarial perturbation to the morphs such that they cannot be detected by trained morph classifiers. The evaluation of the generated identical twin-morphed dataset is performed in terms of vulnerability analysis and presentation attack error rates.

In recent years, face recognition systems have achieved exceptional success due to promising advances in deep learning architectures. However, they still fail to achieve the expected accuracy when matching profile images against a gallery of frontal images. Current approaches either perform pose normalization (i.e., frontalization) or disentangle pose information for face recognition. We instead propose a new approach to utilize pose as auxiliary information via an attention mechanism. In this paper, we hypothesize that pose-attended information using an attention mechanism can guide contextual and distinctive feature extraction from profile faces, which further benefits better representation learning in an embedded domain. To achieve this, first, we design a unified coupled profile-to-frontal face recognition network. It learns the mapping from faces to a compact embedding subspace via a class-specific contrastive loss. Second, we develop a novel pose attention block (PAB) to specially guide the pose-agnostic feature extraction from profile faces. To be more specific, PAB is designed to explicitly help the network to focus on important features along both “channel” and “spatial” dimensions while learning discriminative yet pose-invariant features in an embedding subspace. To validate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we conduct experiments on both controlled and in the- wild benchmarksmore »including Multi-PIE, CFP, and IJB-C, and show superiority over the state-of-the-art.« less

In this paper, we seek to draw connections between the frontal and profile face images in an abstract embedding space. We exploit this connection using a coupled-encoder network to project frontal/profile face images into a common latent embedding space. The proposed model forces the similarity of representations in the embedding space by maximizing the mutual information between two views of the face. The proposed coupled-encoder benefits from three contributions for matching faces with extreme pose disparities. First, we leverage our pose-aware contrastive learning to maximize the mutual information between frontal and profile representations of identities. Second, a memory buffer, which consists of latent representations accumulated over past iterations, is integrated into the model so it can refer to relatively much more instances than the minibatch size. Third, a novel pose-aware adversarial domain adaptation method forces the model to learn an asymmetric mapping from profile to frontal representation. In our framework, the coupled-encoder learns to enlarge the margin between the distribution of genuine and imposter faces, which results in high mutual information between different views of the same identity. The effectiveness of the proposed model is investigated through extensive experiments, evaluations, and ablation studies on four benchmark datasets, and comparison withmore »the compelling state-of-the-art algorithms.« less