PatchNet: A Simple Face Anti-Spoofing Framework via Fine-Grained Patch Recognition

Face anti-spoofing (FAS) plays a critical role in securing face recognition systems from different presentation attacks. Previous works leverage auxiliary pixel-level supervision and domain generalization approaches to address unseen spoof types. However, the local characteristics of image captures, i.e., capturing devices and presenting materials, are ignored in existing works and we argue that such information is required for networks to discriminate between live and spoof images. In this work, we propose PatchNet which reformulates face anti-spoofing as a fine-grained patch-type recognition problem. To be specific, our framework recognizes the combination of capturing devices and presenting materials based on the patches cropped from non-distorted face images. This reformulation can largely improve the data variation and enforce the network to learn discriminative feature from local capture patterns. In addition, to further improve the generalization ability of the spoof feature, we propose the novel Asymmetric Margin-based Classification Loss and Self-supervised Similarity Loss to regularize the patch embedding space. Our experimental results verify our assumption and show that the model is capable of recognizing unseen spoof types robustly by only looking at local regions. Moreover, the fine-grained and patch-level reformulation of FAS outperforms the existing approaches on intra-dataset, cross-dataset, and domain generalization benchmarks. Furthermore, our PatchNet framework can enable practical applications like FewShot Reference-based FAS and facilitate future exploration of spoof-related intrinsic cues.