Humans Vs. Algorithms: Assessment of Security Risks Posed by Facial Morphing to Identity Verification at Border Control

摘要

Facial morphing, if applied to a biometric portrait intended for an identity document application, compromises further identity verification by means of the issued document. An electronic machine readable travel document is a prime target of a face morphing attack because a successful attack allows a wanted criminal for illicit border crossing. The open question is whether human examiners and algorithms can be fooled only by professionally created manual morphs or even by automatically generated morphs with evident visual artifacts. In this paper, we introduce a border control simulation to examine the ability of humans in recognizing morphed passport photographs as well as in mismatching morphed passport photographs against "live" faces of travelers. The error rates of humans are compared with those of algorithms to emphasize the necessity for computer-aided support of border guards.