Suspiciously smooth eyebrows could be a giveaway for criminals who try to evade artificial intelligence-powered border crossings by using passports with doctored images.
补苍诲听 at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology say the increased use of automatic face recognition at border crossings means it is often an AI, rather than a person, that checks whether a traveller鈥檚 face matches the identity documents they carry.
Criminals can take advantage of this by morphing two photographs of different people鈥檚 faces together to create one image, and then applying for a document such as a passport using that image. The combined image is close enough to either person to trick a human and also to fool AI 鈥� allowing either person to travel using the document. This strategy might enable a wanted or banned person to walk straight through border crossings on a real, but hacked, passport.
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Zafar and Busch have created a tool that can spot these morphed images with up to 95.8 per cent accuracy. The software analyses the eyebrow region of the photograph and measures the amount of fine detail, the edges and hard lines of tiny hairs. Readings below a certain threshold mean an image can be classified as fake, because merging two photographs together involves a certain amount of smoothing, which destroys such detail.
Other areas of the face, such as the skin on a cheek, are inherently smooth to begin with, so can鈥檛 be measured in the same way. Zafar says that beards or moustaches could also be good candidates for regions to analyse, but the pair chose eyebrows because almost everyone has them 鈥� and anyone who doesn鈥檛 is likely to have already attracted the attention of border guards.
鈥淲e could have taken the moustache or beard, but then some people choose not to have them, and some people will just not be able to,鈥� says Zafar. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a cat-and-mouse thing, because the technology of creating morphs improves with time. That鈥檚 why there鈥檚 a need that we improve detection.鈥�
arXiv
