Face morph detection for unknown morphing algorithms and image sources: a multi‐scale block local binary pattern fusion approach

Abstract

The vulnerability of face recognition systems against so-called morphing attacks has been revealed in the past years. Recently, different kinds of morphing attack detection approaches have been proposed. However, the vast majority of published results has been obtained from rather constrained experimental setups. In particular, most investigations do not consider variations in morphing techniques, image sources, and image post-processing. Hence, reported performance rates can not be maintained in realistic scenarios, as the NIST FRVT MORPH performance evaluation showed. In this work, existing algorithms are benchmarked on a new, more realistic database. This database consists of two different data sets, from which morphs were created using four different morphing algorithms. In addition, the database contains four different post-processings (including print-scan transformation and JPEG2000 compression). Further, a new morphing attack detection method based on a fusion of different configurations of Multi-scale Block Local Binary Patterns (MB-LBP) on an image divided into multiple cells is presented. The proposed score-level fusion of a maximum number of 18 different configurations is shown to significantly improve the robustness of the resulting morphing attack detection scheme, yielding an average performance between 2.26% and 8.52% in terms of Detection Equal Error Rate (D-EER), depending on the applied post-processing.