With the continuous advancement of generative models, face morphing attacks have become a significant challenge for existing face verification systems due to their potential use in identity fraud and other malicious activities. Contemporary Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) approaches frequently rely on supervised, discriminative models trained on examples of bona fide and morphed images. These models typically perform well with morphs generated with techniques seen during training, but often lead to sub-optimal performance when subjected to novel unseen morphing techniques. While unsupervised models have been shown to perform better in terms of generalizability, they typically result in higher error rates, as they struggle to effectively capture features of subtle artifacts. To address these shortcomings, we present SelfMAD, a novel self-supervised approach that simulates general morphing attack artifacts, allowing classifiers to learn generic and robust decision boundaries without overfitting to the specific artifacts induced by particular face morphing methods. Through extensive experiments on widely used datasets, we demonstrate that SelfMAD significantly outperforms current state-of-theart MADs, reducing the detection error by more than $\mathbf{6 4} \%$ in terms of EER when compared to the strongest unsupervised competitor, and by more than $66 \%$, when compared to the best performing discriminative MAD model, tested in crossmorph settings. The source code for SelfMAD is available at https://github.com/LeonTodorov/SelfMAD.

This work summarises and reports the results of the second Presentation Attack Detection competition on ID cards. This new version includes new elements compared to the previous one. (1) An automatic evaluation platform was enabled for automatic benchmarking; (2) Two tracks were proposed in order to evaluate algorithms and datasets respectively; and (3) A new ID card dataset was shared with Track 1 teams to serve as the baseline dataset for the training and optimisation. The Hochschule Darmstadt, Fraunhofer-IGD, and Facephi company jointly organised this challenge. 20 teams were registered, and 74 submitted models were evaluated. For Track 1, the "Dragons" team reached first place with an Average Ranking and Equal Error rate (EER) of (AVRank) of 40.48% and 11.44% EER, respectively. For the more challenging approach in Track 2, the "Incode" team reached the best results with an AVRank of 14.76% and 6.36% EER, improving on the results of the first edition of 74.30% and 21.87% EER, respectively. These results suggest that PAD on ID cards is improving, but it is still a challenging problem related to the number of images, especially of bona fide images.

The recent advancements in AI (Artificial Intelligence) have been instrumental in fostering the development of AIoT (Artificial Intelligence of Things)-enabled urban environments. Machine vision and image analysis, in particular, have become integral to a wide array of AI applications within the field of urban planning and monitoring. Yet, the rapid adoption of AI algorithms in public areas has significantly heightened privacy concerns. In this paper, we introduce a privacy-by-design approach tailored for intelligent urban systems, presenting a holistic approach to the development and deployment of AI-driven systems for privacy-preserving image acquisition and analysis. Specifically, we design an embedded vision system that acquires privacy-protected data, safeguarding sensitive information against unauthorized access and potential misuse. Furthermore, we propose a strategy for developing AI vision methods using data that has been anonymized, ensuring that privacy is maintained throughout the AI application building process. Through experiments on a real-world AIoT-enabled urban environment use case - traffic flow monitoring at a city intersection - we demonstrate that our approach upholds strong privacy guarantees while maintaining the operational performance of modern AI vision systems.

We propose a novel reconstruction-based model for anomaly detection in image data, called’Y-GAN’. The model consists of a Y-shaped auto-encoder and represents images in two separate latent spaces. The first captures meaningful image semantics, which are key for representing (normal) training data, whereas the second encodes low-level residual image characteristics. To ensure the dual representations encode mutually exclusive information, a disentanglement procedure is designed around a latent (proxy) classifier. Additionally, a novel representation-consistency mechanism is proposed to prevent information leakage between the latent spaces. The model is trained in a one-class learning setting using only normal training data. Due to the separation of semantically-relevant and residual information, Y-GAN is able to derive informative data representations that allow for efficacious anomaly detection across a diverse set of anomaly detection tasks. The model is evaluated in comprehensive experiments with several recent anomaly detection models using four popular image datasets, i.e., MNIST, FMNIST, CIFAR10, and PlantVillage. Experimental results show that Y-GAN outperforms all tested models by a considerable margin and yields state-of-the-art results. The source code for the model is made publicly available at https://github.com/MIvanovska/Y-GAN.

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 In-ternational Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2022). The competition attracted a total of 12 participating teams, both from academia and industry and present in 11 differ-ent 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 at-tract solutions that deal with detecting face morphing at-tacks while protecting people's privacy for ethical and le-gal reasons. To ensure this, the training data was limited to synthetic data provided by the organizers. The submitted solutions presented innovations that led to out-performing the considered baseline in many experimental settings. The evaluation benchmark is now available at: https://github.com/marcohuber/SYN-MAD-2022.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are today the de-facto standard for extracting compact and discriminative face representations (templates) from images in automatic face recognition systems. Due to the characteristics of CNN models, the generated representations typically encode a multitude of information ranging from identity to soft-biometric attributes, such as age, gender or ethnicity. However, since these representations were computed for the purpose of identity recognition only, the soft-biometric information contained in the templates represents a serious privacy risk. To mitigate this problem, we present in this paper a privacy-enhancing approach capable of suppressing potentially sensitive soft-biometric information in face representations without significantly compromising identity information. Specifically, we introduce a Privacy-Enhancing Face-Representation learning Network (PFRNet) that disentangles identity from attribute information in face representations and consequently allows to efficiently suppress soft-biometrics in face templates. We demonstrate the feasibility of PFRNet on the problem of gender suppression and show through rigorous experiments on the CelebA, Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) and Adience datasets that the proposed disentanglement-based approach is highly effective and improves significantly on the existing state-of-the-art.

Anomaly detection in complex data structures is one of the most challenging problems in computer vision. In many real-world problems, for example in the quality control in modern manufacturing, the anomalous samples are usually rare, resulting in (highly) imbalanced datasets. However, in current research practice, these scenarios are rarely modeled, and as a consequence, evaluation of anomaly detection algorithms often do not reproduce results that are useful for practical applications. First, even in case of highly unbalanced input data, anomaly detection algorithms are expected to significantly reduce the proportion of anomalous samples, detecting “almost all” anomalous samples (with exact specifications depending on the target customer). This places high importance on only the small part of the ROC curve, possibly rendering the standard metrics such as AUC (Area Under Curve) and AP (Average Precision) useless. Second, the target of automatic anomaly detection in practical applications is significant reduction in manual work required, and standard metrics are poor predictor of this feature. Finally, the evaluation may produce erratic results for different randomly initialized training runs of the neural network, producing evaluation results that may not reproduce well in practice. In this paper, we present an evaluation methodology that avoids these pitfalls.