Spoofing Deep Face Recognition with Custom Silicone Masks

We investigate the vulnerability of convolutional neural network (CNN) based face-recognition (FR) systems to presentation attacks (PA) performed using custom-made silicone masks. Previous works have studied the vulnerability of CNN-FR systems to 2D PAs such as print-attacks, or digital- video replay attacks, and to rigid 3D masks. This is the first study to consider PAs performed using custom-made flexible silicone masks. Before embarking on research on detecting a new variety of PA, it is important to estimate the seriousness of the threat posed by the type of PA. In this work we demonstrate that PAs using custom silicone masks do pose a serious threat to state-of-the-art FR systems. Using a new dataset based on six custom silicone masks, we show that the vulnerability of each FR system in this study is at least 10 times higher than its false match rate. We also propose a simple but effective presentation attack detection method, based on a low-cost thermal camera.