ECSO Member secunet has recently submitted its algorithm for the recognition of morphed facial images to the independent and internationally recognised National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRVT)-MORPH test. 

Biometrics and facial recognition have made border control more efficient and secure. However, there are types of fraud that still pose a challenge, both for border control officers and automated border control systems. These notably include so-called morphing attacks, in which fraudsters use image editing software to merge their biometric passport photos into a single image that then looks like a composite of two people. When successfully applying this photo for a passport, both fraudsters are then recognizable as the person in the picture and can thus both use the same identity document. If the morphing is done well, neither the facial recognition software nor the officer at the border control counter will notice the difference between the person and the morphed image.

Software algorithms that recognise facial morphs during automated border control can increase border security substantially. Therefore, work on morphing attack detection (MAD) has increasingly been going on for several years by now.

Especially in the category of “High Quality Morphs”, e.g., for manually generated morphs, good results were achieved: If set to a false positive rate of approximately 4% (meaning four out of every hundred facial images are misclassified as morphs and have to be manually verified), secunet’s algorithm spotted 84% of all morphed images. This presents a huge step in comparison to both human test subjects and previous algorithms.
The new algorithm is integrated throughout secunet’s entire border control portfolio and complements other security measures that are already available. Among others, this includes the automated border control system secunet easygate as well as the self-service system secunet easykiosk for pre-enrolment of passenger data. The new algorithm will also be included in the border control application secunet bocoa in combination with secunet easytower as facial image camera. All products and solutions from secunet provide sufficiently high-quality live images for the use as trusted comparison images for differential MAD.

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Source and photo credits: secunet