da/sec scientific talk on Biometrics

Topic: Turning a Vulnerability into an Asset: Accelerating Facial Identification with Morphing

by Pawel Drozdowski
D19/2.03a, May 09, 2019 (Thursday), 12.00 noon

Keywords — biometrics, efficient identification, morphing

Abstract

In recent years, morphing of facial images has arisen as an important attack vector on biometric systems. Detection of morphed images has proven challenging for automated systems and human experts alike. Likewise, in recent years, the importance of efficient (fast) biometric identification has been emphasised by the rapid rise and growth of large-scale biometric systems around the world. The aforementioned, hitherto unrelated, topics within the biometrics domain are combined: the properties of morphed images are exploited for the purpose of improving the transaction times of a biometric identification system. Specifically, morphs of two or more samples are used in the pre-selection step of a two-stage biometric identification system. In a proof-of-concept experimental evaluation using two state-of-the-art open-source facial recognition frameworks it is shown, that the proposed system achieves hit rates comparable to that of an exhaustive search-based baseline, while significantly reducing the penetration rate (and thus the computational workload) associated with the biometric identification transactions.