Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) systems often suffer from performance degradation when deployed in operational environments, such as airports, that differ from the training domain.We propose an adaptive differential MAD framework that continuously refines a pre-trained detector using live bona fide samples acquired at the gate.The system is memoryless, so no samples are stored in memory to mitigate privacy concerns about the collection of personal data.To prevent the loss of discriminative power caused by bona fideonly adaptation, the method generates synthetic morph samples on-the-fly by combining the current operational subject with identities from an external public or synthetic face dataset.The adaptation process further relies on a quality-aware bona fide selection strategy and a controlled balancing mechanism for synthetic morph generation.Experimental results show that the proposed method improves target-domain specialization while maintaining robustness against morph attacks.

Face morphing attacks are widely recognized as one of the most challenging threats to face recognition systems used in electronic identity documents. These attacks exploit a critical vulnerability in passport enrollment procedures adopted by many countries, where the facial image is often acquired without a supervised live capture process. In this paper, we propose a novel face morphing technique based on Arc2Face, an identity-conditioned face foundation model capable of synthesizing photorealistic facial images from compact identity representations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by comparing the morphing attack potential metric on two large-scale sequestered face morphing attack detection datasets against several state-of-the-art morphing methods, as well as on two novel morphed face datasets derived from FEI and ONOT. Experimental results show that the proposed deep learning-based approach achieves a morphing attack potential comparable to that of landmark-based techniques, which have traditionally been regarded as the most challenging. These findings confirm the ability of the proposed method to effectively preserve and manage identity information during the morph generation process.

Facial recognition is a key biometric technology, especially for using electronic documents in real-world applications. The accuracy of this recognition technology strictly depends on the image quality, i.e. the face appearance in the image included in the document. Then, adherence to ISO/ICAO standards, which contain guidelines to standardize the image quality in official documents, is of paramount importance. However, ensuring compliance is challenging due to high subject variability. Furthermore, controls are often executed manually, making them subjective and time-consuming. Therefore, in this work, we introduce BioGaze, an automated framework for ISO/ICAO compliance verification that combines classical computer vision and deep learning algorithms to perform the checks contained in the latest standard version. The framework is tested on a synthetic dataset, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple ISO/ICAO requirements, surpassing public algorithms and commercial SDKs. BioGaze is publicly available to advance automated compliance verification and support standardization efforts1.1https://github.com/MI-BioLab/BioGaze

Ensuring compliance of face images with ISO/ICAO quality standards is essential for boosting the document enrollment process. Indeed, traditional manual checks are slow, subjective, and difficult to scale. Therefore, we propose a system that aims to fully automate compliance verification by directly analyzing the official requirements without relying on predefined hand-crafted features or manual thresholds. Our method combines a Large Language Model, a novel prompt learning procedure, and a contrastive learning framework to evaluate the adherence of a face image to quality requirements. Tested on a recent dataset, our proposed system achieves high accuracy, surpassing existing academic and commercial solutions. By streamlining the implementation and updates to the compliance rules, our approach represents a significant step toward simple, scalable, and regulation-driven image verification. Code and models are publicly available1.

Adversarial attacks pose a significant threat to the reliability of biometric systems, particularly in security-critical applications such as identity verification and access control. Ensuring robustness against such attacks is essential for the safe deployment of face recognition technologies in real-world scenarios. To advance this goal, the 2025 Adversarial Attack Challenge for Secure Face Recognition was organized as part of the International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB) 2025.The competition focused on two main tracks: Detection, where the objective was to determine whether a given face image is clean or adversarial, and Resilience, which aimed to evaluate recognition systems under adversarial perturbations. Participants were provided with a standardized dataset derived from CelebA and LFW, encompassing both clean samples and adversarial images crafted using ten diverse attack methods targeting evasion and impersonation scenarios. To ensure fairness and reproducibility, all models were trained solely on the data provided, with support from a custom open source adversarial attack package tailored for face recognition.In addition to benchmarking adversarial robustness, the challenge contributes to the research community by releasing the data set and the extensible attack package, allowing further investigation of secure and reliable face recognition systems.

Nowadays, state-of-the-art AI-based generative models represent a viable solution to overcome privacy issues and biases in the collection of datasets containing personal information, such as faces. Following this intuition, in this paper we introduce ONOT11One, No one and One hundred Thousand (L. Pirandello, 1926), a synthetic dataset specifically focused on the generation of high-quality faces in adherence to the requirements of the ISO/IEC 39794–5 standards that, following the guidelines of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), defines the interchange formats of face images in electronic Machine-Readable Travel Documents (eMRTD). The strictly controlled and varied mugshot images included in ONOT are useful in research fields related to the analysis of face images in eMRTD, such as Morphing Attack Detection and Face Quality Assessment. The dataset is publicly released22https://miatbiolab.csr.unibo.it/icao-synthetic-dataset, in combination with the generation procedure details in order to improve the reproducibility and enable future extensions.

Large-scale face recognition datasets are collected by crawling the Internet and without individuals' consent, raising legal, ethical, and privacy concerns. With the recent advances in generative models, recently several works proposed generating synthetic face recognition datasets to mitigate concerns in web-crawled face recognition datasets. This paper presents the summary of the Synthetic Data for Face Recognition (SDFR) Competition held in conjunction with the 18th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG 2024) and established to investigate the use of synthetic data for training face recognition models. The SDFR competition was split into two tasks, allowing participants to train face recognition systems using new synthetic datasets and/or existing ones. In the first task, the face recognition backbone was fixed and the dataset size was limited, while the second task provided almost complete freedom on the model backbone, the dataset, and the training pipeline. The submitted models were trained on existing and also new synthetic datasets and used clever methods to improve training with synthetic data. The submissions were evaluated and ranked on a diverse set of seven benchmarking datasets. The paper gives an overview of the submitted face recognition models and reports achieved performance compared to baseline models trained on real and synthetic datasets. Furthermore, the evaluation of submissions is extended to bias assessment across different demography groups. Lastly, an outlook on the current state of the research in training face recognition models using synthetic data is presented, and existing problems as well as potential future directions are also discussed.

In response to the rising threat of the face morphing attack, this paper introduces and explores the potential of Video-based Morphing Attack Detection (V-MAD) systems in real-world operational scenarios. While current morphing attack detection methods primarily focus on a single or a pair of images, V-MAD is based on video sequences, exploiting the video streams acquired by face verification tools available, for instance, at airport gates. We show for the first time the advantages that the availability of multiple probe frames brings to the morphing attack detection task, especially in scenarios where the quality of probe images is varied. Experimental results on a real operational database demonstrate that video sequences represent valuable information for increasing the performance of morphing attack detection systems.

Through the Face Morphing attack is possible to use the same legal document by two different people, destroying the unique biometric link between the document and its owner. In other words, a morphed face image has the potential to bypass face verification-based security controls, then representing a severe security threat. Unfortunately, the lack of public, extensive and varied training datasets severely hampers the development of effective and robust Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) models, key tools in contrasting the Face Morphing attack since able to automatically detect the presence of morphing images. Indeed, privacy regulations limit the possibility of acquiring, storing, and transferring MAD-related data that contain personal information, such as faces. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the use of Federated Learning to train a MAD model on local training samples across multiple sites, eliminating the need for a single centralized training dataset, as common in Machine Learning, and then overcoming privacy limitations. Experimental results suggest that FL is a viable solution that will need to be considered in future research works in MAD.