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  1. Extreme face super-resolution (FSR), that is, improving the resolution of face images by an extreme scaling factor (often greater than ×8) has remained underexplored in the literature of low-level vision. Extreme FSR in the wild must address the challenges of both unpaired training data and unknown degradation factors. Inspired by the latest advances in image super-resolution (SR) and self-supervised learning (SSL), we propose a novel two-step approach to FSR by introducing a mid-resolution (MR) image as the stepping stone. In the first step, we leverage ideas from SSL-based SR reconstruction of medical images (e.g., MRI and ultrasound) to modeling the realistic degradation process of face images in the real world; in the second step, we extract the latent codes from MR images and interpolate them in a self-supervised manner to facilitate artifact-suppressed image reconstruction. Our two-step extreme FSR can be interpreted as the combination of existing self-supervised CycleGAN (step 1) and StyleGAN (step 2) that overcomes the barrier of critical resolution in face recognition. Extensive experimental results have shown that our two-step approach can significantly outperform existing state-of-the-art FSR techniques, including FSRGAN, Bulat's method, and PULSE, especially for large scaling factors such as 64. 
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  2. 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. 
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  3. 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 with the compelling state-of-the-art algorithms. 
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  4. 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. 
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  5. 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 benchmarks including Multi-PIE, CFP, and IJB-C, and show superiority over the state-of-the-art. 
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  6. 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. 
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