Synthetic Data for Face Recognition: Current State and Future Prospects

Over the past years, deep learning capabilities and the availability of large-scale training datasets advanced rapidly, leading to breakthroughs in face recognition accuracy. However, these technologies are foreseen to face a major challenge in the next years due to the legal and ethical concerns about using authentic biometric data in AI model training and evaluation along with increasingly utilizing data-hungry state-of-the-art deep learning models. With the recent advances in deep generative models and their success in generating realistic and high-resolution synthetic image data, privacy-friendly synthetic data has been recently proposed as an alternative to privacy-sensitive authentic data to overcome the challenges of using authentic data in face recognition development. This work aims at providing a clear and structured picture of the use-cases taxonomy of synthetic face data in face recognition along with the recent emerging advances of face recognition models developed on the bases of synthetic data. We also discuss the challenges facing the use of synthetic data in face recognition development and several future prospects of synthetic data in the domain of face recognition.Comment: Accepted at Image and Vision Computing 2023 (IVC 2023

Demographic Bias: A Challenge for Fingervein Recognition Systems?

Recently, concerns regarding potential biases in the underlying algorithms of many automated systems (including biometrics) have been raised. In this context, a biased algorithm produces statistically different outcomes for different groups of individuals based on certain (often protected by anti-discrimination legislation) attributes such as sex and age. While several preliminary studies investigating this matter for facial recognition algorithms do exist, said topic has not yet been addressed for vascular biometric characteristics. Accordingly, in this paper, several popular types of recognition algorithms are benchmarked to ascertain the matter for fingervein recognition. The experimental evaluation suggests lack of bias for the tested algorithms, although future works with larger datasets are needed to validate and confirm those preliminary results.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 8 tables. Submitted to European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) -- special session on bias in biometric

Template-Driven Knowledge Distillation for Compact and Accurate Periocular Biometrics Deep-Learning Models

This work addresses the challenge of building an accurate and generalizable periocular recognition model with a small number of learnable parameters. Deeper (larger) models are typically more capable of learning complex information. For this reason, knowledge distillation (kd) was previously proposed to carry this knowledge from a large model (teacher) into a small model (student). Conventional KD optimizes the student output to be similar to the teacher output (commonly classification output). In biometrics, comparison (verification) and storage operations are conducted on biometric templates, extracted from pre-classification layers. In this work, we propose a novel template-driven KD approach that optimizes the distillation process so that the student model learns to produce templates similar to those produced by the teacher model. We demonstrate our approach on intra- and cross-device periocular verification. Our results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over a network trained without KD and networks trained with conventional (vanilla) KD. For example, the targeted small model achieved an equal error rate (EER) value of 22.2% on cross-device verification without KD. The same model achieved an EER of 21.9% with the conventional KD, and only 14.7% EER when using our proposed template-driven KD

Impact of Face Image Quality Estimation on Presentation Attack Detection

Non-referential face image quality assessment methods have gained popularity as a pre-filtering step on face recognition systems. In most of them, the quality score is usually designed with face matching in mind. However, a small amount of work has been done on measuring their impact and usefulness on Presentation Attack Detection (PAD). In this paper, we study the effect of quality assessment methods on filtering bona fide and attack samples, their impact on PAD systems, and how the performance of such systems is improved when training on a filtered (by quality) dataset. On a Vision Transformer PAD algorithm, a reduction of 20% of the training dataset by removing lower quality samples allowed us to improve the BPCER by 3% in a cross-dataset test

Gaze-based Presentation Attack Detection for Users Wearing Tinted Glasses

Biometric authentication is vulnerable to presentation (spoofing) attacks. It is important to address the security vulnerability of spoofing attacks where an attacker uses an artefact presented at the sensor to subvert the system. Gaze-tracking has been proposed for such attack detection. In this paper, we explore the sensitivity of a gaze-based approach to spoofing detection in the presence of eye-glasses that may impact detection performance. In particular, we investigate the use of partially tinted glasses such as may be used in hazardous environments or outdoors in mobile application scenarios The attack scenarios considered in this work include the use of projected photos, 2D and 3D masks. A gaze-based spoofing detection system has been extensively evaluated using data captured from volunteers performing genuine attempts (with and without wearing such tinted glasses) as well as spoofing attempts using various artefacts. The results of the evaluations indicate that the presence of tinted glasses has a small impact on the accuracy of attack detection, thereby making the use of such gaze-based features possible for a wider range of applications

Multi-Factor Authentication: A Survey

Today, digitalization decisively penetrates all the sides of the modern society. One of the key enablers to maintain this process secure is authentication. It covers many different areas of a hyper-connected world, including online payments, communications, access right management, etc. This work sheds light on the evolution of authentication systems towards Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) starting from Single-Factor Authentication (SFA) and through Two-Factor Authentication (2FA). Particularly, MFA is expected to be utilized for human-to-everything interactions by enabling fast, user-friendly, and reliable authentication when accessing a service. This paper surveys the already available and emerging sensors (factor providers) that allow for authenticating a user with the system directly or by involving the cloud. The corresponding challenges from the user as well as the service provider perspective are also reviewed. The MFA system based on reversed Lagrange polynomial within Shamir’s Secret Sharing (SSS) scheme is further proposed to enable more flexible authentication. This solution covers the cases of authenticating the user even if some of the factors are mismatched or absent. Our framework allows for qualifying the missing factors by authenticating the user without disclosing sensitive biometric data to the verification entity. Finally, a vision of the future trends in MFA is discussed.Peer reviewe