Assessing Bias in Face Image Quality Assessment

Face image quality assessment (FIQA) attempts to improve face recognition (FR) performance by providing additional information about sample quality. Because FIQA methods attempt to estimate the utility of a sample for face recognition, it is reasonable to assume that these methods are heavily influenced by the underlying face recognition system. Although modern face recognition systems are known to perform well, several studies have found that such systems often exhibit problems with demographic bias. It is therefore likely that such problems are also present with FIQA techniques. To investigate the demographic biases associated with FIQA approaches, this paper presents a comprehensive study involving a variety of quality assessment methods (general-purpose image quality assessment, supervised face quality assessment, and unsupervised face quality assessment methods) and three diverse state-of-theart FR models. Our analysis on the Balanced Faces in the Wild (BFW) dataset shows that all techniques considered are affected more by variations in race than sex. While the general-purpose image quality assessment methods appear to be less biased with respect to the two demographic factors considered, the supervised and unsupervised face image quality assessment methods both show strong bias with a tendency to favor white individuals (of either sex). In addition, we found that methods that are less racially biased perform worse overall. This suggests that the observed bias in FIQA methods is to a significant extent related to the underlying face recognition system.Comment: The content of this paper was published in EUSIPCO 202

Face Morphing Attack Detection with Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Morphed face images have recently become a growing concern for existing face verification systems, as they are relatively easy to generate and can be used to impersonate someone's identity for various malicious purposes. Efficient Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) that generalizes well across different morphing techniques is, therefore, of paramount importance. Existing MAD techniques predominantly rely on discriminative models that learn from examples of bona fide and morphed images and, as a result, often exhibit sub-optimal generalization performance when confronted with unknown types of morphing attacks. To address this problem, we propose a novel, diffusion-based MAD method in this paper that learns only from the characteristics of bona fide images. Various forms of morphing attacks are then detected by our model as out-of-distribution samples. We perform rigorous experiments over four different datasets (CASIA-WebFace, FRLL-Morphs, FERET-Morphs and FRGC-Morphs) and compare the proposed solution to both discriminatively-trained and once-class MAD models. The experimental results show that our MAD model achieves highly competitive results on all considered datasets.Comment: Published at IWBF 202

Influence of segmentation on deep iris recognition performance

Despite the rise of deep learning in numerous areas of computer vision and image processing, iris recognition has not benefited considerably from these trends so far. Most of the existing research on deep iris recognition is focused on new models for generating discriminative and robust iris representations and relies on methodologies akin to traditional iris recognition pipelines. Hence, the proposed models do not approach iris recognition in an end-to-end manner, but rather use standard heuristic iris segmentation (and unwrapping) techniques to produce normalized inputs for the deep learning models. However, because deep learning is able to model very complex data distributions and nonlinear data changes, an obvious question arises. How important is the use of traditional segmentation methods in a deep learning setting? To answer this question, we present in this paper an empirical analysis of the impact of iris segmentation on the performance of deep learning models using a simple two stage pipeline consisting of a segmentation and a recognition step. We evaluate how the accuracy of segmentation influences recognition performance but also examine if segmentation is needed at all. We use the CASIA Thousand and SBVPI datasets for the experiments and report several interesting findings.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, submitted to IWBF 201

On the Vulnerability of DeepFake Detectors to Attacks Generated by Denoising Diffusion Models

The detection of malicious Deepfakes is a constantly evolving problem, that requires continuous monitoring of detectors, to ensure they are able to detect image manipulations generated by the latest emerging models. In this paper, we present a preliminary study that investigates the vulnerability of single-image Deepfake detectors to attacks created by a representative of the newest generation of generative methods, i.e. Denoising Diffusion Models (DDMs). Our experiments are run on FaceForensics++, a commonly used benchmark dataset, consisting of Deepfakes generated with various techniques for face swapping and face reenactment. The analysis shows, that reconstructing existing Deepfakes with only one denoising diffusion step significantly decreases the accuracy of all tested detectors, without introducing visually perceptible image changes.Comment: Submitted for revie

BiOcularGAN: Bimodal Synthesis and Annotation of Ocular Images

Current state-of-the-art segmentation techniques for ocular images are critically dependent on large-scale annotated datasets, which are labor-intensive to gather and often raise privacy concerns. In this paper, we present a novel framework, called BiOcularGAN, capable of generating synthetic large-scale datasets of photorealistic (visible light and near-infrared) ocular images, together with corresponding segmentation labels to address these issues. At its core, the framework relies on a novel Dual-Branch StyleGAN2 (DB-StyleGAN2) model that facilitates bimodal image generation, and a Semantic Mask Generator (SMG) component that produces semantic annotations by exploiting latent features of the DB-StyleGAN2 model. We evaluate BiOcularGAN through extensive experiments across five diverse ocular datasets and analyze the effects of bimodal data generation on image quality and the produced annotations. Our experimental results show that BiOcularGAN is able to produce high-quality matching bimodal images and annotations (with minimal manual intervention) that can be used to train highly competitive (deep) segmentation models (in a privacy aware-manner) that perform well across multiple real-world datasets. The source code for the BiOcularGAN framework is publicly available at https://github.com/dariant/BiOcularGAN.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figure

High Resolution Face Editing with Masked GAN Latent Code Optimization

Face editing represents a popular research topic within the computer vision and image processing communities. While significant progress has been made recently in this area, existing solutions: (i) are still largely focused on low-resolution images, (ii) often generate editing results with visual artefacts, or (iii) lack fine-grained control and alter multiple (entangled) attributes at once, when trying to generate the desired facial semantics. In this paper, we aim to address these issues though a novel attribute editing approach called MaskFaceGAN. The proposed approach is based on an optimization procedure that directly optimizes the latent code of a pre-trained (state-of-the-art) Generative Adversarial Network (i.e., StyleGAN2) with respect to several constraints that ensure: (i) preservation of relevant image content, (ii) generation of the targeted facial attributes, and (iii) spatially--selective treatment of local image areas. The constraints are enforced with the help of an (differentiable) attribute classifier and face parser that provide the necessary reference information for the optimization procedure. MaskFaceGAN is evaluated in extensive experiments on the CelebA-HQ, Helen and SiblingsDB-HQf datasets and in comparison with several state-of-the-art techniques from the literature, i.e., StarGAN, AttGAN, STGAN, and two versions of InterFaceGAN. Our experimental results show that the proposed approach is able to edit face images with respect to several facial attributes with unprecedented image quality and at high-resolutions (1024x1024), while exhibiting considerably less problems with attribute entanglement than competing solutions. The source code is made freely available from: https://github.com/MartinPernus/MaskFaceGAN.Comment: The updated paper will be submitted to IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. Added more qualitative and quantitative results to the main part of the paper. This version now also includes the supplementary materia

Optimization-Based Improvement of Face Image Quality Assessment Techniques

Contemporary face recognition (FR) models achieve near-ideal recognition performance in constrained settings, yet do not fully translate the performance to unconstrained (realworld) scenarios. To help improve the performance and stability of FR systems in such unconstrained settings, face image quality assessment (FIQA) techniques try to infer sample-quality information from the input face images that can aid with the recognition process. While existing FIQA techniques are able to efficiently capture the differences between high and low quality images, they typically cannot fully distinguish between images of similar quality, leading to lower performance in many scenarios. To address this issue, we present in this paper a supervised quality-label optimization approach, aimed at improving the performance of existing FIQA techniques. The developed optimization procedure infuses additional information (computed with a selected FR model) into the initial quality scores generated with a given FIQA technique to produce better estimates of the "actual" image quality. We evaluate the proposed approach in comprehensive experiments with six state-of-the-art FIQA approaches (CR-FIQA, FaceQAN, SER-FIQ, PCNet, MagFace, SDD-FIQA) on five commonly used benchmarks (LFW, CFPFP, CPLFW, CALFW, XQLFW) using three targeted FR models (ArcFace, ElasticFace, CurricularFace) with highly encouraging results.Comment: In proceedings of the International Workshop on Biometrics and Forensics (IWBF) 202

Beyond Detection: Visual Realism Assessment of Deepfakes

In the era of rapid digitalization and artificial intelligence advancements, the development of DeepFake technology has posed significant security and privacy concerns. This paper presents an effective measure to assess the visual realism of DeepFake videos. We utilize an ensemble of two Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models: Eva and ConvNext. These models have been trained on the DeepFake Game Competition (DFGC) 2022 dataset and aim to predict Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) from DeepFake videos based on features extracted from sequences of frames. Our method secured the third place in the recent DFGC on Visual Realism Assessment held in conjunction with the 2023 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2023). We provide an over\-view of the models, data preprocessing, and training procedures. We also report the performance of our models against the competition's baseline model and discuss the implications of our findings

Body Segmentation Using Multi-task Learning

Body segmentation is an important step in many computer vision problems involving human images and one of the key components that affects the performance of all downstream tasks. Several prior works have approached this problem using a multi-task model that exploits correlations between different tasks to improve segmentation performance. Based on the success of such solutions, we present in this paper a novel multi-task model for human segmentation/parsing that involves three tasks, i.e., (i) keypoint-based skeleton estimation, (ii) dense pose prediction, and (iii) human-body segmentation. The main idea behind the proposed Segmentation--Pose--DensePose model (or SPD for short) is to learn a better segmentation model by sharing knowledge across different, yet related tasks. SPD is based on a shared deep neural network backbone that branches off into three task-specific model heads and is learned using a multi-task optimization objective. The performance of the model is analysed through rigorous experiments on the LIP and ATR datasets and in comparison to a recent (state-of-the-art) multi-task body-segmentation model. Comprehensive ablation studies are also presented. Our experimental results show that the proposed multi-task (segmentation) model is highly competitive and that the introduction of additional tasks contributes towards a higher overall segmentation performance