Can personalised hygienic masks be used to attack face recognition systems?

The proliferation of automated face recognition (FR) necessitates increasingly accurate person identification. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the limitations of FR systems when presented with faces occluded by hygienic masks. However, the security risks of personalised hygienic mask attacks, whereby an attacker wears the mask on which the bottom part of an enrolled user’s face is printed, have not yet been studied. To address this research gap, we introduce a novel face dataset consisting of smartphone-recorded videos of real (bona-fide) faces and personalised hygienic mask attacks. We also analyse the vulnerability of two state-of-the-art FR systems to this type of attack, using our dataset. Our results indicate that personalised hygienic mask attacks have the potential to compromise system security, particularly for FR systems that are tuned towards optimising user convenience. These findings underscore the importance of developing suitable Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) algorithms. Our dataset will help researchers and practitioners work towards this goal, thereby enhancing the security and reliability of FR systems.