arXiv subjects

Fadi Boutros

Publications and source records attributed to Fadi Boutros.

71 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Privacy-friendly Synthetic Data for the Development of Face Morphing Attack Detectors

The main question this work aims at answering is: "can morphing attack detection (MAD) solutions be successfully developed based on synthetic data?". Towards that, this work introduces the first synthetic-based MAD development dataset, namely the Synthetic Morphing Attack Detection Development dataset (SMDD). This dataset is utilized successfully to train three MAD backbones where it proved to lead to high MAD performance, even on completely unknown attack types. Additionally, an essential aspect of this work is the detailed legal analyses of the challenges of using and sharing real biometric data, rendering our proposed SMDD dataset extremely essential. The SMDD dataset, consisting of 30,000 attack and 50,000 bona fide samples, is publicly available for research purposes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

ElasticFace: Elastic Margin Loss for Deep Face Recognition

Learning discriminative face features plays a major role in building high-performing face recognition models. The recent state-of-the-art face recognition solutions proposed to incorporate a fixed penalty margin on commonly used classification loss function, softmax loss, in the normalized hypersphere to increase the discriminative power of face recognition models, by minimizing the intra-class variation and maximizing the inter-class variation. Marginal penalty softmax losses, such as ArcFace and CosFace, assume that the geodesic distance between and within the different identities can be equally learned using a fixed penalty margin. However, such a learning objective is not realistic for real data with inconsistent inter-and intra-class variation, which might limit the discriminative and generalizability of the face recognition model. In this paper, we relax the fixed penalty margin constrain by proposing elastic penalty margin loss (ElasticFace) that allows flexibility in the push for class separability. The main idea is to utilize random margin values drawn from a normal distribution in each training iteration. This aims at giving the decision boundary chances to extract and retract to allow space for flexible class separability learning. We demonstrate the superiority of our ElasticFace loss over ArcFace and CosFace losses, using the same geometric transformation, on a large set of mainstream benchmarks. From a wider perspective, our ElasticFace has advanced the state-of-the-art face recognition performance on seven out of nine mainstream benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Self-restrained Triplet Loss for Accurate Masked Face Recognition

Using the face as a biometric identity trait is motivated by the contactless nature of the capture process and the high accuracy of the recognition algorithms. After the current COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a face mask has been imposed in public places to keep the pandemic under control. However, face occlusion due to wearing a mask presents an emerging challenge for face recognition systems. In this paper, we present a solution to improve masked face recognition performance. Specifically, we propose the Embedding Unmasking Model (EUM) operated on top of existing face recognition models. We also propose a novel loss function, the Self-restrained Triplet (SRT), which enabled the EUM to produce embeddings similar to these of unmasked faces of the same identities. The achieved evaluation results on three face recognition models, two real masked datasets, and two synthetically generated masked face datasets proved that our proposed approach significantly improves the performance in most experimental settings.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

PocketNet: Extreme Lightweight Face Recognition Network using Neural Architecture Search and Multi-Step Knowledge Distillation

Deep neural networks have rapidly become the mainstream method for face recognition (FR). However, this limits the deployment of such models that contain an extremely large number of parameters to embedded and low-end devices. In this work, we present an extremely lightweight and accurate FR solution, namely PocketNet. We utilize neural architecture search to develop a new family of lightweight face-specific architectures. We additionally propose a novel training paradigm based on knowledge distillation (KD), the multi-step KD, where the knowledge is distilled from the teacher model to the student model at different stages of the training maturity. We conduct a detailed ablation study proving both, the sanity of using NAS for the specific task of FR rather than general object classification, and the benefits of our proposed multi-step KD. We present an extensive experimental evaluation and comparisons with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) compact FR models on nine different benchmarks including large-scale evaluation benchmarks such as IJB-B, IJB-C, and MegaFace. PocketNets have consistently advanced the SOTA FR performance on nine mainstream benchmarks when considering the same level of model compactness. With 0.92M parameters, our smallest network PocketNetS-128 achieved very competitive results to recent SOTA compacted models that contain up to 4M parameters.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Mask-invariant Face Recognition through Template-level Knowledge Distillation

The emergence of the global COVID-19 pandemic poses new challenges for biometrics. Not only are contactless biometric identification options becoming more important, but face recognition has also recently been confronted with the frequent wearing of masks. These masks affect the performance of previous face recognition systems, as they hide important identity information. In this paper, we propose a mask-invariant face recognition solution (MaskInv) that utilizes template-level knowledge distillation within a training paradigm that aims at producing embeddings of masked faces that are similar to those of non-masked faces of the same identities. In addition to the distilled knowledge, the student network benefits from additional guidance by margin-based identity classification loss, ElasticFace, using masked and non-masked faces. In a step-wise ablation study on two real masked face databases and five mainstream databases with synthetic masks, we prove the rationalization of our MaskInv approach. Our proposed solution outperforms previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) academic solutions in the recent MFRC-21 challenge in both scenarios, masked vs masked and masked vs non-masked, and also outperforms the previous solution on the MFR2 dataset. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the proposed model can still perform well on unmasked faces with only a minor loss in verification performance. The code, the trained models, as well as the evaluation protocol on the synthetically masked data are publicly available: https://github.com/fdbtrs/Masked-Face-Recognition-KD.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Partial Attack Supervision and Regional Weighted Inference for Masked Face Presentation Attack Detection

Wearing a mask has proven to be one of the most effective ways to prevent the transmission of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. However, wearing a mask poses challenges for different face recognition tasks and raises concerns about the performance of masked face presentation detection (PAD). The main issues facing the mask face PAD are the wrongly classified bona fide masked faces and the wrongly classified partial attacks (covered by real masks). This work addresses these issues by proposing a method that considers partial attack labels to supervise the PAD model training, as well as regional weighted inference to further improve the PAD performance by varying the focus on different facial areas. Our proposed method is not directly linked to specific network architecture and thus can be directly incorporated into any common or custom-designed network. In our work, two neural networks (DeepPixBis and MixFaceNet) are selected as backbones. The experiments are demonstrated on the collaborative real mask attack (CRMA) database. Our proposed method outperforms established PAD methods in the CRMA database by reducing the mentioned shortcomings when facing masked faces. Moreover, we present a detailed step-wise ablation study pointing out the individual and joint benefits of the proposed concepts on the overall PAD performance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

FocusFace: Multi-task Contrastive Learning for Masked Face Recognition

SARS-CoV-2 has presented direct and indirect challenges to the scientific community. One of the most prominent indirect challenges advents from the mandatory use of face masks in a large number of countries. Face recognition methods struggle to perform identity verification with similar accuracy on masked and unmasked individuals. It has been shown that the performance of these methods drops considerably in the presence of face masks, especially if the reference image is unmasked. We propose FocusFace, a multi-task architecture that uses contrastive learning to be able to accurately perform masked face recognition. The proposed architecture is designed to be trained from scratch or to work on top of state-of-the-art face recognition methods without sacrificing the capabilities of a existing models in conventional face recognition tasks. We also explore different approaches to design the contrastive learning module. Results are presented in terms of masked-masked (M-M) and unmasked-masked (U-M) face verification performance. For both settings, the results are on par with published methods, but for M-M specifically, the proposed method was able to outperform all the solutions that it was compared to. We further show that when using our method on top of already existing methods the training computational costs decrease significantly while retaining similar performances. The implementation and the trained models are available at GitHub.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

PW-MAD: Pixel-wise Supervision for Generalized Face Morphing Attack Detection

A face morphing attack image can be verified to multiple identities, making this attack a major vulnerability to processes based on identity verification, such as border checks. Various methods have been proposed to detect face morphing attacks, however, with low generalizability to unexpected post-morphing processes. A major post-morphing process is the print and scan operation performed in many countries when issuing a passport or identity document. In this work, we address this generalization problem by adapting a pixel-wise supervision approach where we train a network to classify each pixel of the image into an attack or not, rather than only having one label for the whole image. Our pixel-wise morphing attack detection (PW-MAD) solution proved to perform more accurately than a set of established baselines. More importantly, PW-MAD shows high generalizability in comparison to related works, when evaluated on unknown re-digitized attacks. Additionally to our PW-MAD approach, we create a new face morphing attack dataset with digital and re-digitized samples, namely the LMA-DRD dataset that is publicly available for research purposes upon request.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

ReGenMorph: Visibly Realistic GAN Generated Face Morphing Attacks by Attack Re-generation

Face morphing attacks aim at creating face images that are verifiable to be the face of multiple identities, which can lead to building faulty identity links in operations like border checks. While creating a morphed face detector (MFD), training on all possible attack types is essential to achieve good detection performance. Therefore, investigating new methods of creating morphing attacks drives the generalizability of MADs. Creating morphing attacks was performed on the image level, by landmark interpolation, or on the latent-space level, by manipulating latent vectors in a generative adversarial network. The earlier results in varying blending artifacts and the latter results in synthetic-like striping artifacts. This work presents the novel morphing pipeline, ReGenMorph, to eliminate the LMA blending artifacts by using a GAN-based generation, as well as, eliminate the manipulation in the latent space, resulting in visibly realistic morphed images compared to previous works. The generated ReGenMorph appearance is compared to recent morphing approaches and evaluated for face recognition vulnerability and attack detectability, whether as known or unknown attacks.

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arXiv2021

My Eyes Are Up Here: Promoting Focus on Uncovered Regions in Masked Face Recognition

The recent Covid-19 pandemic and the fact that wearing masks in public is now mandatory in several countries, created challenges in the use of face recognition systems (FRS). In this work, we address the challenge of masked face recognition (MFR) and focus on evaluating the verification performance in FRS when verifying masked vs unmasked faces compared to verifying only unmasked faces. We propose a methodology that combines the traditional triplet loss and the mean squared error (MSE) intending to improve the robustness of an MFR system in the masked-unmasked comparison mode. The results obtained by our proposed method show improvements in a detailed step-wise ablation study. The conducted study showed significant performance gains induced by our proposed training paradigm and modified triplet loss on two evaluation databases.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

MixFaceNets: Extremely Efficient Face Recognition Networks

In this paper, we present a set of extremely efficient and high throughput models for accurate face verification, MixFaceNets which are inspired by Mixed Depthwise Convolutional Kernels. Extensive experiment evaluations on Label Face in the Wild (LFW), Age-DB, MegaFace, and IARPA Janus Benchmarks IJB-B and IJB-C datasets have shown the effectiveness of our MixFaceNets for applications requiring extremely low computational complexity. Under the same level of computation complexity (< 500M FLOPs), our MixFaceNets outperform MobileFaceNets on all the evaluated datasets, achieving 99.60% accuracy on LFW, 97.05% accuracy on AgeDB-30, 93.60 TAR (at FAR1e-6) on MegaFace, 90.94 TAR (at FAR1e-4) on IJB-B and 93.08 TAR (at FAR1e-4) on IJB-C. With computational complexity between 500M and 1G FLOPs, our MixFaceNets achieved results comparable to the top-ranked models, while using significantly fewer FLOPs and less computation overhead, which proves the practical value of our proposed MixFaceNets. All training codes, pre-trained models, and training logs have been made available https://github.com/fdbtrs/mixfacenets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

MFR 2021: Masked Face Recognition Competition

This paper presents a summary of the Masked Face Recognition Competitions (MFR) held within the 2021 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2021). The competition attracted a total of 10 participating teams with valid submissions. The affiliations of these teams are diverse and associated with academia and industry in nine different countries. These teams successfully submitted 18 valid solutions. The competition is designed to motivate solutions aiming at enhancing the face recognition accuracy of masked faces. Moreover, the competition considered the deployability of the proposed solutions by taking the compactness of the face recognition models into account. A private dataset representing a collaborative, multi-session, real masked, capture scenario is used to evaluate the submitted solutions. In comparison to one of the top-performing academic face recognition solutions, 10 out of the 18 submitted solutions did score higher masked face verification accuracy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Iris Presentation Attack Detection by Attention-based and Deep Pixel-wise Binary Supervision Network

Iris presentation attack detection (PAD) plays a vital role in iris recognition systems. Most existing CNN-based iris PAD solutions 1) perform only binary label supervision during the training of CNNs, serving global information learning but weakening the capture of local discriminative features, 2) prefer the stacked deeper convolutions or expert-designed networks, raising the risk of overfitting, 3) fuse multiple PAD systems or various types of features, increasing difficulty for deployment on mobile devices. Hence, we propose a novel attention-based deep pixel-wise binary supervision (A-PBS) method. Pixel-wise supervision is first able to capture the fine-grained pixel/patch-level cues. Then, the attention mechanism guides the network to automatically find regions that most contribute to an accurate PAD decision. Extensive experiments are performed on LivDet-Iris 2017 and three other publicly available databases to show the effectiveness and robustness of proposed A-PBS methods. For instance, the A-PBS model achieves an HTER of 6.50% on the IIITD-WVU database outperforming state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

On Benchmarking Iris Recognition within a Head-mounted Display for AR/VR Application

Augmented and virtual reality is being deployed in different fields of applications. Such applications might involve accessing or processing critical and sensitive information, which requires strict and continuous access control. Given that Head-Mounted Displays (HMD) developed for such applications commonly contains internal cameras for gaze tracking purposes, we evaluate the suitability of such setup for verifying the users through iris recognition. In this work, we first evaluate a set of iris recognition algorithms suitable for HMD devices by investigating three well-established handcrafted feature extraction approaches, and to complement it, we also present the analysis using four deep learning models. While taking into consideration the minimalistic hardware requirements of stand-alone HMD, we employ and adapt a recently developed miniature segmentation model (EyeMMS) for segmenting the iris. Further, to account for non-ideal and non-collaborative capture of iris, we define a new iris quality metric that we termed as Iris Mask Ratio (IMR) to quantify the iris recognition performance. Motivated by the performance of iris recognition, we also propose the continuous authentication of users in a non-collaborative capture setting in HMD. Through the experiments on a publicly available OpenEDS dataset, we show that performance with EER = 5% can be achieved using deep learning methods in a general setting, along with high accuracy for continuous user authentication.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Iris Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet-Iris) -- The 2020 Edition

Launched in 2013, LivDet-Iris is an international competition series open to academia and industry with the aim to assess and report advances in iris Presentation Attack Detection (PAD). This paper presents results from the fourth competition of the series: LivDet-Iris 2020. This year's competition introduced several novel elements: (a) incorporated new types of attacks (samples displayed on a screen, cadaver eyes and prosthetic eyes), (b) initiated LivDet-Iris as an on-going effort, with a testing protocol available now to everyone via the Biometrics Evaluation and Testing (BEAT)(https://www.idiap.ch/software/beat/) open-source platform to facilitate reproducibility and benchmarking of new algorithms continuously, and (c) performance comparison of the submitted entries with three baseline methods (offered by the University of Notre Dame and Michigan State University), and three open-source iris PAD methods available in the public domain. The best performing entry to the competition reported a weighted average APCER of 59.10\% and a BPCER of 0.46\% over all five attack types. This paper serves as the latest evaluation of iris PAD on a large spectrum of presentation attack instruments.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

The Effect of Wearing a Mask on Face Recognition Performance: an Exploratory Study

Face recognition has become essential in our daily lives as a convenient and contactless method of accurate identity verification. Process such as identity verification at automatic border control gates or the secure login to electronic devices are increasingly dependant on such technologies. The recent COVID-19 pandemic have increased the value of hygienic and contactless identity verification. 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 in a collaborative environment is currently sensitive yet understudied issue. We address that by presenting a specifically collected database containing three session, each with three different capture instructions, to simulate realistic use cases. We further study the effect of masked face probes on the behaviour of three top-performing face recognition systems, two academic solutions and one commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Cascaded Generation of High-quality Color Visible Face Images from Thermal Captures

Generating visible-like face images from thermal images is essential to perform manual and automatic cross-spectrum face recognition. We successfully propose a solution based on cascaded refinement network that, unlike previous works, produces high quality generated color images without the need for face alignment, large databases, data augmentation, polarimetric sensors, computationally-intense training, or unrealistic restriction on the generated resolution. The training of our solution is based on the contextual loss, making it inherently scale (face area) and rotation invariant. We present generated image samples of unknown individuals under different poses and occlusion conditions.We also prove the high similarity in image quality between ground-truth images and generated ones by comparing seven quality metrics. We compare our results with two state-of-the-art approaches proving the superiority of our proposed approach.

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