To Detect or not to Detect: The Right Faces to Morph

Abstract

Recent works have studied the face morphing attack detection performance generalization over variations in morphing approaches, image re-digitization, and image source variations. However, these works assumed a constant approach for selecting the images to be morphed (pairing) across their training and testing data. A realistic variation in the pairing protocol in the training data can result in challenges and opportunities for a stable attack detector. This work extensively study this issue by building a novel database with three different pairing protocols and two different morphing approaches. We study the detection generalization over these variations for single image and differential attack detection, along with handcrafted and CNN-based features. Our observations included that training an attack detection solution on attacks created from dissimilar face images, in contrary to the common practice, can result in an overall more generalized detection performance. Moreover, we found that differential attack detection is very sensitive to variations in morphing and pairing protocols.