# Face Morphing: Fooling a Face Recognition System Is Simple!

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.13796 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13796/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 36 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 May 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 36)

- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Analyzing and Improving the Image Quality of StyleGAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.04958/) (2019)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Large Scale GAN Training for High Fidelity Natural Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.11096/) (2018)
- [Conditional Generative Adversarial Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.1784/) (2014)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05027/) (2016)
- [Semantic Image Synthesis with Spatially-Adaptive Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.07291/) (2019)
- [Joint Face Detection and Alignment using Multi-task Cascaded Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.02878/) (2016)
- [Self-Attention Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08318/) (2018)
- [Encoding in Style: a StyleGAN Encoder for Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00951/) (2020)
- [Interpreting the Latent Space of GANs for Semantic Face Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10786/) (2019)
- [Image2StyleGAN: How to Embed Images Into the StyleGAN Latent Space?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03189/) (2019)
- [MS-Celeb-1M: A Dataset and Benchmark for Large-Scale Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08221/) (2016)
- [Thinking in Frequency: Face Forgery Detection by Mining Frequency-aware Clues](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09355/) (2020)
- [In-Domain GAN Inversion for Real Image Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00049/) (2020)
- [Image2StyleGAN++: How to Edit the Embedded Images?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11544/) (2019)
- [A Learned Representation For Artistic Style](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.07629/) (2016)
- [Multi-attentional Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02406/) (2021)
- [FSGAN: Subject Agnostic Face Swapping and Reenactment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05932/) (2019)
- [Cross-Age LFW: A Database for Studying Cross-Age Face Recognition in Unconstrained Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.08197/) (2017)
- [ReStyle: A Residual-Based StyleGAN Encoder via Iterative Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02699/) (2021)
- [AttGAN: Facial Attribute Editing by Only Changing What You Want](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.10678/) (2017)
- [FaceShifter: Towards High Fidelity And Occlusion Aware Face Swapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13457/) (2019)
- [Image Processing Using Multi-Code GAN Prior](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07116/) (2019)
- [Editing in Style: Uncovering the Local Semantics of GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14367/) (2020)
- [DeepFaceLab: Integrated, flexible and extensible face-swapping framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.05535/) (2020)
- [Fast Face-swap Using Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09577/) (2016)
- [Generative Hierarchical Features from Synthesizing Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10379/) (2020)
- [Can GAN Generated Morphs Threaten Face Recognition Systems Equally as Landmark Based Morphs? -- Vulnerability and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.03621/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

State-of-the-art face recognition (FR) approaches have shown remarkable results in predicting whether two faces belong to the same identity, yielding accuracies between 92% and 100% depending on the difficulty of the protocol. However, the accuracy drops substantially when exposed to morphed faces, specifically generated to look similar to two identities. To generate morphed faces, we integrate a simple pretrained FR model into a generative adversarial network (GAN) and modify several loss functions for face morphing. In contrast to previous works, our approach and analyses are not limited to pairs of frontal faces with the same ethnicity and gender. Our qualitative and quantitative results affirm that our approach achieves a seamless change between two faces even in unconstrained scenarios. Despite using features from a simpler FR model for face morphing, we demonstrate that even recent FR systems struggle to distinguish the morphed face from both identities obtaining an accuracy of only 55-70%. Besides, we provide further insights into how knowing the FR system makes it particularly vulnerable to face morphing attacks.