Leveraging Adversarial Learning for the Detection of Morphing Attacks

An emerging threat towards face recognition systems (FRS) is face morphing attack, which involves the combination of two faces from two different identities into a singular image that would trigger an acceptance for either identity within the FRS. Many of the existing morphing attack detection (MAD) approaches have been trained and evaluated on datasets with limited variation of image characteristics, which can make the approach prone to overfitting. Additionally, there has been difficulty in developing MAD algorithms which can generalize beyond the morphing attack they were trained on, as shown by the most recent NIST FRVT MORPH report. Furthermore, the Single image based MAD (S-MAD) problem has had poor performance, especially when compared to its counterpart, Differential based MAD (D-MAD). In this work, we propose a novel architecture for training deep learning based S-MAD algorithms that leverages adversarial learning to train a more robust detector. The performance of the proposed S-MAD method is benchmarked against the state-of-the-art VGG19 based S-MAD algorithm over 36 experiments using the ISO-IEC 30107-3 evaluation metrics. The proposed method has demonstrated superior and robust detection performance of less than 5% D-EER when evaluated against different morphing attacks.