Sushma Venkatesh

Bio: Sushma Venkatesh is an academic researcher from Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The author has contributed to research in topics: Facial recognition system & Morphing. The author has an hindex of 15, co-authored 49 publications receiving 650 citations. Previous affiliations of Sushma Venkatesh include University of Mysore.

Transferable Deep-CNN Features for Detecting Digital and Print-Scanned Morphed Face Images

Abstract: Face biometrics is widely used in various applications including border control and facilitating the verification of travellers' identity claim with respect to his electronic passport (ePass). As in most countries, passports are issued to a citizen based on the submitted photo which allows the applicant to provide a morphed face photo to conceal his identity during the application process. In this work, we propose a novel approach leveraging the transferable features from a pre-trained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (D-CNN) to detect both digital and print-scanned morphed face image. Thus, the proposed approach is based on the feature level fusion of the first fully connected layers of two D-CNN (VGG19 and AlexNet) that are specifically fine-tuned using the morphed face image database. The proposed method is extensively evaluated on the newly constructed database with both digital and print-scanned morphed face images corresponding to bona fide and morphed data reflecting a real-life scenario. The obtained results consistently demonstrate improved detection performance of the proposed scheme over previously proposed methods on both the digital and the print-scanned morphed face image database.

Face morphing versus face averaging: Vulnerability and detection

Abstract: 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.

MIPGAN—Generating Strong and High Quality Morphing Attacks Using Identity Prior Driven GAN

Abstract: Face morphing attacks target to circumvent Face Recognition Systems (FRS) by employing face images derived from multiple data subjects (e.g., accomplices and malicious actors). Morphed images can be verified against contributing data subjects with a reasonable success rate, given they have a high degree of facial resemblance. The success of morphing attacks is directly dependent on the quality of the generated morph images. We present a new approach for generating strong attacks extending our earlier framework for generating face morphs. We present a new approach using an Identity Prior Driven Generative Adversarial Network, which we refer to as MIPGAN (Morphing through Identity Prior driven GAN) . The proposed MIPGAN is derived from the StyleGAN with a newly formulated loss function exploiting perceptual quality and identity factor to generate a high quality morphed facial image with minimal artefacts and with high resolution. We demonstrate the proposed approach’s applicability to generate strong morphing attacks by evaluating its vulnerability against both commercial and deep learning based Face Recognition System (FRS) and demonstrate the success rate of attacks. Extensive experiments are carried out to assess the FRS’s vulnerability against the proposed morphed face generation technique on three types of data such as digital images, re-digitized (printed and scanned) images, and compressed images after re-digitization from newly generated MIPGAN Face Morph Dataset . The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed approach of morph generation poses a high threat to FRS.

Can GAN Generated Morphs Threaten Face Recognition Systems Equally as Landmark Based Morphs? - Vulnerability and Detection

Abstract: The primary objective of face morphing is to com-bine face images of different data subjects (e.g. an malicious actor and an accomplice) to generate a face image that can be equally verified for both contributing data subjects. In this paper, we propose a new framework for generating face morphs using a newer Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) - StyleGAN. In contrast to earlier works, we generate realistic morphs of both high-quality and high resolution of 1024 × 1024 pixels. With the newly created morphing dataset of 2500 morphed face images, we pose a critical question in this work. (i) Can GAN generated morphs threaten Face Recognition Systems (FRS) equally as Landmark based morphs? Seeking an answer, we benchmark the vulnerability of a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf FRS (COTS) and a deep learning-based FRS (ArcFace). This work also benchmarks the detection approaches for both GAN generated morphs against the landmark based morphs using established Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) schemes.

Morphing Attack Detection-Database, Evaluation Platform, and Benchmarking

Abstract: Morphing attacks have posed a severe threat to Face Recognition System (FRS). Despite the number of advancements reported in recent works, we note serious open issues such as independent benchmarking, generalizability challenges and considerations to age, gender, ethnicity that are inadequately addressed. Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) algorithms often are prone to generalization challenges as they are database dependent. The existing databases, mostly of semi-public nature, lack in diversity in terms of ethnicity, various morphing process and post-processing pipelines. Further, they do not reflect a realistic operational scenario for Automated Border Control (ABC) and do not provide a basis to test MAD on unseen data, in order to benchmark the robustness of algorithms. In this work, we present a new sequestered dataset for facilitating the advancements of MAD where the algorithms can be tested on unseen data in an effort to better generalize. The newly constructed dataset consists of facial images from 150 subjects from various ethnicities, age-groups and both genders. In order to challenge the existing MAD algorithms, the morphed images are with careful subject pre-selection created from the contributing images, and further post-processed to remove morphing artifacts. The images are also printed and scanned to remove all digital cues and to simulate a realistic challenge for MAD algorithms. Further, we present a new online evaluation platform to test algorithms on sequestered data. With the platform we can benchmark the morph detection performance and study the generalization ability. This work also presents a detailed analysis on various subsets of sequestered data and outlines open challenges for future directions in MAD research.

FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images

Abstract: The rapid progress in synthetic image generation and manipulation has now come to a point where it raises significant concerns for the implications towards society. At best, this leads to a loss of trust in digital content, but could potentially cause further harm by spreading false information or fake news. This paper examines the realism of state-of-the-art image manipulations, and how difficult it is to detect them, either automatically or by humans. To standardize the evaluation of detection methods, we propose an automated benchmark for facial manipulation detection. In particular, the benchmark is based on Deep-Fakes, Face2Face, FaceSwap and NeuralTextures as prominent representatives for facial manipulations at random compression level and size. The benchmark is publicly available and contains a hidden test set as well as a database of over 1.8 million manipulated images. This dataset is over an order of magnitude larger than comparable, publicly available, forgery datasets. Based on this data, we performed a thorough analysis of data-driven forgery detectors. We show that the use of additional domain-specific knowledge improves forgery detection to unprecedented accuracy, even in the presence of strong compression, and clearly outperforms human observers.

FaceForensics++: Learning to Detect Manipulated Facial Images

Abstract: The rapid progress in synthetic image generation and manipulation has now come to a point where it raises significant concerns for the implications towards society. At best, this leads to a loss of trust in digital content, but could potentially cause further harm by spreading false information or fake news. This paper examines the realism of state-of-the-art image manipulations, and how difficult it is to detect them, either automatically or by humans. To standardize the evaluation of detection methods, we propose an automated benchmark for facial manipulation detection. In particular, the benchmark is based on DeepFakes, Face2Face, FaceSwap and NeuralTextures as prominent representatives for facial manipulations at random compression level and size. The benchmark is publicly available and contains a hidden test set as well as a database of over 1.8 million manipulated images. This dataset is over an order of magnitude larger than comparable, publicly available, forgery datasets. Based on this data, we performed a thorough analysis of data-driven forgery detectors. We show that the use of additional domainspecific knowledge improves forgery detection to unprecedented accuracy, even in the presence of strong compression, and clearly outperforms human observers.

Deepfake Video Detection Using Recurrent Neural Networks

Abstract: In recent months a machine learning based free software tool has made it easy to create believable face swaps in videos that leaves few traces of manipulation, in what are known as "deepfake" videos. Scenarios where these realistic fake videos are used to create political distress, blackmail someone or fake terrorism events are easily envisioned. This paper proposes a temporal-aware pipeline to automatically detect deepfake videos. Our system uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract frame-level features. These features are then used to train a recurrent neural network (RNN) that learns to classify if a video has been subject to manipulation or not. We evaluate our method against a large set of deepfake videos collected from multiple video websites. We show how our system can achieve competitive results in this task while using a simple architecture.