mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Invisible Mask: Practical Attacks on Face Recognition with Infrared

arXiv 1803.04683 ↗First posted 13 Mar 2018cs.CRcited by 33

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Abstract (arXiv)

Accurate face recognition techniques make a series of critical applications possible: policemen could employ it to retrieve criminals' faces from surveillance video streams; cross boarder travelers could pass a face authentication inspection line without the involvement of officers. Nonetheless, when public security heavily relies on such intelligent systems, the designers should deliberately consider the emerging attacks aiming at misleading those systems employing face recognition. We propose a kind of brand new attack against face recognition systems, which is realized by illuminating the subject using infrared according to the adversarial examples worked out by our algorithm, thus face recognition systems can be bypassed or misled while simultaneously the infrared perturbations cannot be observed by raw eyes. Through launching this kind of attack, an attacker not only can dodge surveillance cameras. More importantly, he can impersonate his target victim and pass the face authentication system, if only the victim's photo is acquired by the attacker. Again, the attack is totally unobservable by nearby people, because not only the light is invisible, but also the device we made to launch the attack is small enough. According to our study on a large dataset, attackers have a very high success rate with a over 70% success rate for finding such an adversarial example that can be implemented by infrared. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first one to shed light on the severity of threat resulted from infrared adversarial examples against face recognition.

Key facts. Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 13 Mar 2018.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 7; 2022: 12; 2023: 7; 2024: 3; 2025: 4.

33 papers.

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  1. 2021Advances in adversarial attacks and defenses in computer vision: A surveycited by 127
  2. 2021Adversarial Sticker: A Stealthy Attack Method in the Physical Worldcited by 92
  3. 2021Adversarial Laser Beam: Effective Physical-World Attack to DNNs in a Blinkcited by 75
  4. 2021Fooling thermal infrared pedestrian detectors in real world using small bulbscited by 51
  5. 2022Physical-World Optical Adversarial Attacks on 3D Face Recognitioncited by 23
  6. 2021"Adversarial Examples" for Proof-of-Learningcited by 19
  7. 2021They See Me Rollin': Inherent Vulnerability of the Rolling Shutter in CMOS Image Sensorscited by 17
  8. 2021SoK: Anti-Facial Recognition Technologycited by 16
  9. 2022Rolling Colors: Adversarial Laser Exploits against Traffic Light Recognitioncited by 15
  10. 2023Physical Adversarial Attacks for Surveillance: A Surveycited by 15
  11. 2022Scattering Model Guided Adversarial Examples for SAR Target Recognition: Attack and Defensecited by 14
  12. 2024Invisible Reflections: Leveraging Infrared Laser Reflections to Target Traffic Sign Perceptioncited by 14
21 more
  1. 2022Adversarial Laser Spot: Robust and Covert Physical-World Attack to DNNscited by 11
  2. 2022Adversarial Color Film: Effective Physical-World Attack to DNNscited by 11
  3. 2022Visual Adversarial Attacks and Defenses in the Physical World: A Surveycited by 11
  4. 2023State-of-the-art optical-based physical adversarial attacks for deep learning computer vision systemscited by 8
  5. 2022Adversarial Neon Beam: A Light-based Physical Attack to DNNscited by 6
  6. 2022Adversarial Zoom Lens: A Novel Physical-World Attack to DNNscited by 4
  7. 2024A Survey on Physical Adversarial Attacks against Face Recognition Systemscited by 4
  8. 2022Tubes Among Us: Analog Attack on Automatic Speaker Identificationcited by 3
  9. 2023URET: Universal Robustness Evaluation Toolkit (for Evasion)cited by 3
  10. 2023Why Don't You Clean Your Glasses? Perception Attacks with Dynamic Optical Perturbationscited by 2
  11. 2024Rethinking the Threat and Accessibility of Adversarial Attacks against Face Recognition Systemscited by 2
  12. 2022RAF: Recursive Adversarial Attacks on Face Recognition Using Extremely Limited Queriescited by 1
  13. 2022Adversarial Color Projection: A Projector-based Physical Attack to DNNscited by 1
  14. 2022Adversarial Catoptric Light: An Effective, Stealthy and Robust Physical-World Attack to DNNscited by 1
  15. 2023Imperceptible Physical Attack against Face Recognition Systems via LED Illumination Modulationcited by 1
  16. 2023Human-Producible Adversarial Examplescited by 1
  17. 2023Imperceptible CMOS camera dazzle for adversarial attacks on deep neural networkscited by 0
  18. 2025Towards an End-to-End (E2E) Adversarial Learning and Application in the Physical Worldcited by 0
  19. 2025A Privacy Enhancing Technique to Evade Detection by Street Video Cameras Without Using Adversarial Accessoriescited by 0
  20. 2025Human-Imperceptible Physical Adversarial Attack for NIR Face Recognition Modelscited by 0
  21. 2025Revisiting Physically Realizable Adversarial Object Attack against LiDAR-based Detection: Clarifying Problem Formulation and Experimental Protocolscited by 0