Detecting Morphing Attacks through Face Geometry Features

Abstract

Face-morphing operations allow for the generation of digital faces that simultaneously carry the characteristics of two different subjects. It has been demonstrated that morphed faces strongly challenge face-verification systems, as they typically match two different identities. This poses serious security issues in machine-assisted border control applications and calls for techniques to automatically detect whether morphing operations have been previously applied on passport photos. While many proposed approaches analyze the suspect passport photo only, our work operates in a differential scenario, i.e., when the passport photo is analyzed in conjunction with the probe image of the subject acquired at border control to verify that they correspond to the same identity. To this purpose, in this study, we analyze the locations of biologically meaningful facial landmarks identified in the two images, with the goal of capturing inconsistencies in the facial geometry introduced by the morphing process. We report the results of extensive experiments performed on images of various sources and under different experimental settings showing that landmark locations detected through automated algorithms contain discriminative information for identifying pairs with morphed passport photos. Sensitivity of supervised classifiers to different compositions on the training and testing sets are also explored, together with the performance of different derived feature transformations.