Face morphing versus face averaging: Vulnerability and detection

The Face Recognition System (FRS) is known to be vulnerable to the attacks using the morphed face. As the use of face characteristics are mandatory in the electronic passport (ePass), morphing attacks have raised the potential concerns in the border security. In this paper, we analyze the vulnerability of the FRS to the new attack performed using the averaged face. The averaged face is generated by simple pixel level averaging of two face images corresponding to two different subjects. We benchmark the vulnerability of the commercial FRS to both conventional morphing and averaging based face attacks. We further propose a novel algorithm based on the collaborative representation of the micro-texture features that are extracted from the colour space to reliably detect both morphed and averaged face attacks on the FRS. Extensive experiments are carried out on the newly constructed morphed and averaged face image database with 163 subjects. The database is built by considering the real-life scenario of the passport issuance that typically accepts the printed passport photo from the applicant that is further scanned and stored in the ePass. Thus, the newly constructed database is built to have the print-scanned bonafide, morphed and averaged face samples. The obtained results have demonstrated the improved performance of the proposed scheme on print-scanned morphed and averaged face database.