Can GAN Generated Morphs Threaten Face Recognition Systems Equally as Landmark Based Morphs? -- Vulnerability and Detection

Abstract: The primary objective of face morphing is to combine face images of different data subjects (e.g. a malicious actor and an accomplice) to generate a face image that can be equally verified for both contributing data subjects. In this paper, we propose a new framework for generating face morphs using a newer Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) - StyleGAN. In contrast to earlier works, we generate realistic morphs of both high-quality and high resolution of 1024$\times$1024 pixels. With the newly created morphing dataset of 2500 morphed face images, we pose a critical question in this work. \textit{(i) Can GAN generated morphs threaten Face Recognition Systems (FRS) equally as Landmark based morphs?} Seeking an answer, we benchmark the vulnerability of a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf FRS (COTS) and a deep learning-based FRS (ArcFace). This work also benchmarks the detection approaches for both GAN generated morphs against the landmark based morphs using established Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) schemes.