Morph Deterction from Single Face Image: a Multi-Algorithm Fusion Approach

Abstract

The vulnerability of face, fingerprint and iris recognition systems to attacks based on morphed biometric samples has been established in the recent past. However, so far a reliable detection of morphed biometric samples has remained an unsolved research challenge. In this work, we propose the first multi-algorithm fusion approach to detect morphed facial images. The FRGCv2 face database is used to create a set of 4,808 morphed and 2,210 bona fide face images which are divided into a training and test set. From a single cropped facial image features are extracted using four types of complementary feature extraction algorithms, including texture descriptors, keypoint extractors, gradient estimators and a deep learning-based method. By performing a score-level fusion of comparison scores obtained by four different types of feature extractors, a detection equal error rate (D-EER) of 2.8% is achieved. Compared to the best single algorithm approach achieving a D-EER of 5.5%, the D-EER of the proposed multi-algorithm fusion system is al- most twice as low, confirming the soundness of the presented approach.