arXiv subjects

Fadi Boutros

Publications and source records attributed to Fadi Boutros.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

FRCSyn Challenge at WACV 2024:Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data

Despite the widespread adoption of face recognition technology around the world, and its remarkable performance on current benchmarks, there are still several challenges that must be covered in more detail. This paper offers an overview of the Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (FRCSyn) organized at WACV 2024. This is the first international challenge aiming to explore the use of synthetic data in face recognition to address existing limitations in the technology. Specifically, the FRCSyn Challenge targets concerns related to data privacy issues, demographic biases, generalization to unseen scenarios, and performance limitations in challenging scenarios, including significant age disparities between enrollment and testing, pose variations, and occlusions. The results achieved in the FRCSyn Challenge, together with the proposed benchmark, contribute significantly to the application of synthetic data to improve face recognition technology.

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arXiv2023

Bias and Diversity in Synthetic-based Face Recognition

Synthetic data is emerging as a substitute for authentic data to solve ethical and legal challenges in handling authentic face data. The current models can create real-looking face images of people who do not exist. However, it is a known and sensitive problem that face recognition systems are susceptible to bias, i.e. performance differences between different demographic and non-demographics attributes, which can lead to unfair decisions. In this work, we investigate how the diversity of synthetic face recognition datasets compares to authentic datasets, and how the distribution of the training data of the generative models affects the distribution of the synthetic data. To do this, we looked at the distribution of gender, ethnicity, age, and head position. Furthermore, we investigated the concrete bias of three recent synthetic-based face recognition models on the studied attributes in comparison to a baseline model trained on authentic data. Our results show that the generator generate a similar distribution as the used training data in terms of the different attributes. With regard to bias, it can be seen that the synthetic-based models share a similar bias behavior with the authentic-based models. However, with the uncovered lower intra-identity attribute consistency seems to be beneficial in reducing bias.

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arXiv2023

IDiff-Face: Synthetic-based Face Recognition through Fizzy Identity-Conditioned Diffusion Models

The availability of large-scale authentic face databases has been crucial to the significant advances made in face recognition research over the past decade. However, legal and ethical concerns led to the recent retraction of many of these databases by their creators, raising questions about the continuity of future face recognition research without one of its key resources. Synthetic datasets have emerged as a promising alternative to privacy-sensitive authentic data for face recognition development. However, recent synthetic datasets that are used to train face recognition models suffer either from limitations in intra-class diversity or cross-class (identity) discrimination, leading to less optimal accuracies, far away from the accuracies achieved by models trained on authentic data. This paper targets this issue by proposing IDiff-Face, a novel approach based on conditional latent diffusion models for synthetic identity generation with realistic identity variations for face recognition training. Through extensive evaluations, our proposed synthetic-based face recognition approach pushed the limits of state-of-the-art performances, achieving, for example, 98.00% accuracy on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark, far ahead from the recent synthetic-based face recognition solutions with 95.40% and bridging the gap to authentic-based face recognition with 99.82% accuracy.

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arXiv2023

EFaR 2023: Efficient Face Recognition Competition

This paper presents the summary of the Efficient Face Recognition Competition (EFaR) held at the 2023 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2023). The competition received 17 submissions from 6 different teams. To drive further development of efficient face recognition models, the submitted solutions are ranked based on a weighted score of the achieved verification accuracies on a diverse set of benchmarks, as well as the deployability given by the number of floating-point operations and model size. The evaluation of submissions is extended to bias, cross-quality, and large-scale recognition benchmarks. Overall, the paper gives an overview of the achieved performance values of the submitted solutions as well as a diverse set of baselines. The submitted solutions use small, efficient network architectures to reduce the computational cost, some solutions apply model quantization. An outlook on possible techniques that are underrepresented in current solutions is given as well.

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arXiv2023

ExFaceGAN: Exploring Identity Directions in GAN's Learned Latent Space for Synthetic Identity Generation

Deep generative models have recently presented impressive results in generating realistic face images of random synthetic identities. To generate multiple samples of a certain synthetic identity, previous works proposed to disentangle the latent space of GANs by incorporating additional supervision or regularization, enabling the manipulation of certain attributes. Others proposed to disentangle specific factors in unconditional pretrained GANs latent spaces to control their output, which also requires supervision by attribute classifiers. Moreover, these attributes are entangled in GAN's latent space, making it difficult to manipulate them without affecting the identity information. We propose in this work a framework, ExFaceGAN, to disentangle identity information in pretrained GANs latent spaces, enabling the generation of multiple samples of any synthetic identity. Given a reference latent code of any synthetic image and latent space of pretrained GAN, our ExFaceGAN learns an identity directional boundary that disentangles the latent space into two sub-spaces, with latent codes of samples that are either identity similar or dissimilar to a reference image. By sampling from each side of the boundary, our ExFaceGAN can generate multiple samples of synthetic identity without the need for designing a dedicated architecture or supervision from attribute classifiers. We demonstrate the generalizability and effectiveness of ExFaceGAN by integrating it into learned latent spaces of three SOTA GAN approaches. As an example of the practical benefit of our ExFaceGAN, we empirically prove that data generated by ExFaceGAN can be successfully used to train face recognition models (\url{https://github.com/fdbtrs/ExFaceGAN}).

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arXiv2023

Are Explainability Tools Gender Biased? A Case Study on Face Presentation Attack Detection

Face recognition (FR) systems continue to spread in our daily lives with an increasing demand for higher explainability and interpretability of FR systems that are mainly based on deep learning. While bias across demographic groups in FR systems has already been studied, the bias of explainability tools has not yet been investigated. As such tools aim at steering further development and enabling a better understanding of computer vision problems, the possible existence of bias in their outcome can lead to a chain of biased decisions. In this paper, we explore the existence of bias in the outcome of explainability tools by investigating the use case of face presentation attack detection. By utilizing two different explainability tools on models with different levels of bias, we investigate the bias in the outcome of such tools. Our study shows that these tools show clear signs of gender bias in the quality of their explanations.

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arXiv2023

Synthetic Data for Face Recognition: Current State and Future Prospects

Over the past years, deep learning capabilities and the availability of large-scale training datasets advanced rapidly, leading to breakthroughs in face recognition accuracy. However, these technologies are foreseen to face a major challenge in the next years due to the legal and ethical concerns about using authentic biometric data in AI model training and evaluation along with increasingly utilizing data-hungry state-of-the-art deep learning models. With the recent advances in deep generative models and their success in generating realistic and high-resolution synthetic image data, privacy-friendly synthetic data has been recently proposed as an alternative to privacy-sensitive authentic data to overcome the challenges of using authentic data in face recognition development. This work aims at providing a clear and structured picture of the use-cases taxonomy of synthetic face data in face recognition along with the recent emerging advances of face recognition models developed on the bases of synthetic data. We also discuss the challenges facing the use of synthetic data in face recognition development and several future prospects of synthetic data in the domain of face recognition.

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arXiv2023

Identity-driven Three-Player Generative Adversarial Network for Synthetic-based Face Recognition

Many of the commonly used datasets for face recognition development are collected from the internet without proper user consent. Due to the increasing focus on privacy in the social and legal frameworks, the use and distribution of these datasets are being restricted and strongly questioned. These databases, which have a realistically high variability of data per identity, have enabled the success of face recognition models. To build on this success and to align with privacy concerns, synthetic databases, consisting purely of synthetic persons, are increasingly being created and used in the development of face recognition solutions. In this work, we present a three-player generative adversarial network (GAN) framework, namely IDnet, that enables the integration of identity information into the generation process. The third player in our IDnet aims at forcing the generator to learn to generate identity-separable face images. We empirically proved that our IDnet synthetic images are of higher identity discrimination in comparison to the conventional two-player GAN, while maintaining a realistic intra-identity variation. We further studied the identity link between the authentic identities used to train the generator and the generated synthetic identities, showing very low similarities between these identities. We demonstrated the applicability of our IDnet data in training face recognition models by evaluating these models on a wide set of face recognition benchmarks. In comparison to the state-of-the-art works in synthetic-based face recognition, our solution achieved comparable results to a recent rendering-based approach and outperformed all existing GAN-based approaches. The training code and the synthetic face image dataset are publicly available ( https://github.com/fdbtrs/Synthetic-Face-Recognition ).

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arXiv2023

CR-FIQA: Face Image Quality Assessment by Learning Sample Relative Classifiability

The quality of face images significantly influences the performance of underlying face recognition algorithms. Face image quality assessment (FIQA) estimates the utility of the captured image in achieving reliable and accurate recognition performance. In this work, we propose a novel learning paradigm that learns internal network observations during the training process. Based on that, our proposed CR-FIQA uses this paradigm to estimate the face image quality of a sample by predicting its relative classifiability. This classifiability is measured based on the allocation of the training sample feature representation in angular space with respect to its class center and the nearest negative class center. We experimentally illustrate the correlation between the face image quality and the sample relative classifiability. As such property is only observable for the training dataset, we propose to learn this property from the training dataset and utilize it to predict the quality measure on unseen samples. This training is performed simultaneously while optimizing the class centers by an angular margin penalty-based softmax loss used for face recognition model training. Through extensive evaluation experiments on eight benchmarks and four face recognition models, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposed CR-FIQA over state-of-the-art (SOTA) FIQA algorithms.

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arXiv2023

MorDIFF: Recognition Vulnerability and Attack Detectability of Face Morphing Attacks Created by Diffusion Autoencoders

Investigating new methods of creating face morphing attacks is essential to foresee novel attacks and help mitigate them. Creating morphing attacks is commonly either performed on the image-level or on the representation-level. The representation-level morphing has been performed so far based on generative adversarial networks (GAN) where the encoded images are interpolated in the latent space to produce a morphed image based on the interpolated vector. Such a process was constrained by the limited reconstruction fidelity of GAN architectures. Recent advances in the diffusion autoencoder models have overcome the GAN limitations, leading to high reconstruction fidelity. This theoretically makes them a perfect candidate to perform representation-level face morphing. This work investigates using diffusion autoencoders to create face morphing attacks by comparing them to a wide range of image-level and representation-level morphs. Our vulnerability analyses on four state-of-the-art face recognition models have shown that such models are highly vulnerable to the created attacks, the MorDIFF, especially when compared to existing representation-level morphs. Detailed detectability analyses are also performed on the MorDIFF, showing that they are as challenging to detect as other morphing attacks created on the image- or representation-level. Data and morphing script are made public: https://github.com/naserdamer/MorDIFF.

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arXiv2023

Intra and Cross-spectrum Iris Presentation Attack Detection in the NIR and Visible Domains

Iris Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) is essential to secure iris recognition systems. Recent iris PAD solutions achieved good performance by leveraging deep learning techniques. However, most results were reported under intra-database scenarios and it is unclear if such solutions can generalize well across databases and capture spectra. These PAD methods run the risk of overfitting because of the binary label supervision during the network training, which serves global information learning but weakens the capture of local discriminative features. This chapter presents a novel attention-based deep pixel-wise binary supervision (A-PBS) method. A-PBS utilizes pixel-wise supervision to capture the fine-grained pixel/patch-level cues and attention mechanism to guide the network to automatically find regions where most contribute to an accurate PAD decision. Extensive experiments are performed on six NIR and one visible-light iris databases to show the effectiveness and robustness of proposed A-PBS methods. We additionally conduct extensive experiments under intra-/cross-database and intra-/cross-spectrum for detailed analysis. The results of our experiments indicates the generalizability of the A-PBS iris PAD approach.

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arXiv2022

Unsupervised Face Recognition using Unlabeled Synthetic Data

Over the past years, the main research innovations in face recognition focused on training deep neural networks on large-scale identity-labeled datasets using variations of multi-class classification losses. However, many of these datasets are retreated by their creators due to increased privacy and ethical concerns. Very recently, privacy-friendly synthetic data has been proposed as an alternative to privacy-sensitive authentic data to comply with privacy regulations and to ensure the continuity of face recognition research. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised face recognition model based on unlabeled synthetic data (USynthFace). Our proposed USynthFace learns to maximize the similarity between two augmented images of the same synthetic instance. We enable this by a large set of geometric and color transformations in addition to GAN-based augmentation that contributes to the USynthFace model training. We also conduct numerous empirical studies on different components of our USynthFace. With the proposed set of augmentation operations, we proved the effectiveness of our USynthFace in achieving relatively high recognition accuracies using unlabeled synthetic data.

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arXiv2022

OCFR 2022: Competition on Occluded Face Recognition From Synthetically Generated Structure-Aware Occlusions

This work summarizes the IJCB Occluded Face Recognition Competition 2022 (IJCB-OCFR-2022) embraced by the 2022 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2022). OCFR-2022 attracted a total of 3 participating teams, from academia. Eventually, six valid submissions were submitted and then evaluated by the organizers. The competition was held to address the challenge of face recognition in the presence of severe face occlusions. The participants were free to use any training data and the testing data was built by the organisers by synthetically occluding parts of the face images using a well-known dataset. The submitted solutions presented innovations and performed very competitively with the considered baseline. A major output of this competition is a challenging, realistic, and diverse, and publicly available occluded face recognition benchmark with well defined evaluation protocols.

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arXiv2022

SYN-MAD 2022: Competition on Face Morphing Attack Detection Based on Privacy-aware Synthetic Training Data

This paper presents a summary of the Competition on Face Morphing Attack Detection Based on Privacy-aware Synthetic Training Data (SYN-MAD) held at the 2022 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2022). The competition attracted a total of 12 participating teams, both from academia and industry and present in 11 different countries. In the end, seven valid submissions were submitted by the participating teams and evaluated by the organizers. The competition was held to present and attract solutions that deal with detecting face morphing attacks while protecting people's privacy for ethical and legal reasons. To ensure this, the training data was limited to synthetic data provided by the organizers. The submitted solutions presented innovations that led to outperforming the considered baseline in many experimental settings. The evaluation benchmark is now available at: https://github.com/marcohuber/SYN-MAD-2022.

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arXiv2022

Unsupervised Face Morphing Attack Detection via Self-paced Anomaly Detection

The supervised-learning-based morphing attack detection (MAD) solutions achieve outstanding success in dealing with attacks from known morphing techniques and known data sources. However, given variations in the morphing attacks, the performance of supervised MAD solutions drops significantly due to the insufficient diversity and quantity of the existing MAD datasets. To address this concern, we propose a completely unsupervised MAD solution via self-paced anomaly detection (SPL-MAD) by leveraging the existing large-scale face recognition (FR) datasets and the unsupervised nature of convolutional autoencoders. Using general FR datasets that might contain unintentionally and unlabeled manipulated samples to train an autoencoder can lead to a diverse reconstruction behavior of attack and bona fide samples. We analyze this behavior empirically to provide a solid theoretical ground for designing our unsupervised MAD solution. This also results in proposing to integrate our adapted modified self-paced learning paradigm to enhance the reconstruction error separability between the bona fide and attack samples in a completely unsupervised manner. Our experimental results on a diverse set of MAD evaluation datasets show that the proposed unsupervised SPL-MAD solution outperforms the overall performance of a wide range of supervised MAD solutions and provides higher generalizability on unknown attacks.

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arXiv2022

SFace: Privacy-friendly and Accurate Face Recognition using Synthetic Data

Recent deep face recognition models proposed in the literature utilized large-scale public datasets such as MS-Celeb-1M and VGGFace2 for training very deep neural networks, achieving state-of-the-art performance on mainstream benchmarks. Recently, many of these datasets, e.g., MS-Celeb-1M and VGGFace2, are retracted due to credible privacy and ethical concerns. This motivates this work to propose and investigate the feasibility of using a privacy-friendly synthetically generated face dataset to train face recognition models. Towards this end, we utilize a class-conditional generative adversarial network to generate class-labeled synthetic face images, namely SFace. To address the privacy aspect of using such data to train a face recognition model, we provide extensive evaluation experiments on the identity relation between the synthetic dataset and the original authentic dataset used to train the generative model. Our reported evaluation proved that associating an identity of the authentic dataset to one with the same class label in the synthetic dataset is hardly possible. We also propose to train face recognition on our privacy-friendly dataset, SFace, using three different learning strategies, multi-class classification, label-free knowledge transfer, and combined learning of multi-class classification and knowledge transfer. The reported evaluation results on five authentic face benchmarks demonstrated that the privacy-friendly synthetic dataset has high potential to be used for training face recognition models, achieving, for example, a verification accuracy of 91.87\% on LFW using multi-class classification and 99.13\% using the combined learning strategy.

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arXiv2022

QuantFace: Towards Lightweight Face Recognition by Synthetic Data Low-bit Quantization

Deep learning-based face recognition models follow the common trend in deep neural networks by utilizing full-precision floating-point networks with high computational costs. Deploying such networks in use-cases constrained by computational requirements is often infeasible due to the large memory required by the full-precision model. Previous compact face recognition approaches proposed to design special compact architectures and train them from scratch using real training data, which may not be available in a real-world scenario due to privacy concerns. We present in this work the QuantFace solution based on low-bit precision format model quantization. QuantFace reduces the required computational cost of the existing face recognition models without the need for designing a particular architecture or accessing real training data. QuantFace introduces privacy-friendly synthetic face data to the quantization process to mitigate potential privacy concerns and issues related to the accessibility to real training data. Through extensive evaluation experiments on seven benchmarks and four network architectures, we demonstrate that QuantFace can successfully reduce the model size up to 5x while maintaining, to a large degree, the verification performance of the full-precision model without accessing real training datasets.

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arXiv2022

Masked Face Recognition: Human vs. Machine

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has increased the focus on hygienic and contactless identity verification methods. However, the pandemic led to the wide use of face masks, essential to keep the pandemic under control. The effect of wearing a mask on face recognition (FR) in a collaborative environment is a currently sensitive yet understudied issue. Recent reports have tackled this by evaluating the masked probe effect on the performance of automatic FR solutions. However, such solutions can fail in certain processes, leading to performing the verification task by a human expert. This work provides a joint evaluation and in-depth analyses of the face verification performance of human experts in comparison to state-of-the-art automatic FR solutions. This involves an extensive evaluation by human experts and 4 automatic recognition solutions. The study concludes with a set of take-home messages on different aspects of the correlation between the verification behavior of humans and machines.

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