Towards Effective Adversarial Textured 3D Meshes on Physical Face Recognition
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Abstract (arXiv)
Face recognition is a prevailing authentication solution in numerous biometric applications. Physical adversarial attacks, as an important surrogate, can identify the weaknesses of face recognition systems and evaluate their robustness before deployed. However, most existing physical attacks are either detectable readily or ineffective against commercial recognition systems. The goal of this work is to develop a more reliable technique that can carry out an end-to-end evaluation of adversarial robustness for commercial systems. It requires that this technique can simultaneously deceive black-box recognition models and evade defensive mechanisms. To fulfill this, we design adversarial textured 3D meshes (AT3D) with an elaborate topology on a human face, which can be 3D-printed and pasted on the attacker's face to evade the defenses. However, the mesh-based optimization regime calculates gradients in high-dimensional mesh space, and can be trapped into local optima with unsatisfactory transferability. To deviate from the mesh-based space, we propose to perturb the low-dimensional coefficient space based on 3D Morphable Model, which significantly improves black-box transferability meanwhile enjoying faster search efficiency and better visual quality. Extensive experiments in digital and physical scenarios show that our method effectively explores the security vulnerabilities of multiple popular commercial services, including three recognition APIs, four anti-spoofing APIs, two prevailing mobile phones and two automated access control systems.
Key facts. Cited by 33 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 35 of its 52 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2023.
Builds on
35 of 52 references.
References · 35
- 2015Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognitioncited by 51,809
- 2014Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimizationcited by 36,960
- 2014Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examplescited by 7,287
- 2017Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, and Variationcited by 2,967
- 2015FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clusteringcited by 2,833
- 2018CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognitioncited by 968
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- 2019Efficient Decision-based Black-box Adversarial Attacks on Face Recognitioncited by 173
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- 2019AdvHat: Real-world adversarial attack on ArcFace Face ID systemcited by 161
23 more
- 2016Regressing Robust and Discriminative 3D Morphable Models with a very Deep Neural Networkcited by 109
- 2021Adversarial Sticker: A Stealthy Attack Method in the Physical Worldcited by 92
- 2021Improving Transferability of Adversarial Patches on Face Recognition with Generative Modelscited by 80
- 2016Shape Completion Enabled Robotic Graspingcited by 79
- 2020Deep Spatial Gradient and Temporal Depth Learning for Face Anti-spoofingcited by 70
- 2020CASIA-SURF CeFA: A Benchmark for Multi-modal Cross-ethnicity Face Anti-spoofingcited by 66
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- 2021Imperceptible Transfer Attack and Defense on 3D Point Cloud Classificationcited by 36
- 2019On adversarial patches: real-world attack on ArcFace-100 face recognition systemcited by 35
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- 20213D Adversarial Attacks Beyond Point Cloudcited by 26
- 2021Robust Physical-World Attacks on Face Recognitioncited by 26
- 2022Isometric 3D Adversarial Examples in the Physical Worldcited by 25
- 2019Design and Interpretation of Universal Adversarial Patches in Face Detectioncited by 22
- 2022Exploring the Devil in Graph Spectral Domain for 3D Point Cloud Attackscited by 19
- 20213D High-Fidelity Mask Face Presentation Attack Detection Challengecited by 18
- 2021FACESEC: A Fine-grained Robustness Evaluation Framework for Face Recognition Systemscited by 14
- 2020RobFR: Benchmarking Adversarial Robustness on Face Recognitioncited by 10
- 2022Controllable Evaluation and Generation of Physical Adversarial Patch on Face Recognitioncited by 8
- 2021Model-Agnostic Meta-Attack: Towards Reliable Evaluation of Adversarial Robustnesscited by 3
- 2022Masked Faces with Faced Maskscited by 2
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 8; 2024: 12; 2025: 9; 2026: 4.
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- 2023Physical Adversarial Attacks for Surveillance: A Surveycited by 15
- 2023Adversarial Examples in the Physical World: A Surveycited by 10
- 2024Artwork Protection Against Neural Style Transfer Using Locally Adaptive Adversarial Color Attackcited by 9
- 2025UV-Attack: Physical-World Adversarial Attacks for Person Detection via Dynamic-NeRF-based UV Mappingcited by 8
- 2024Rethinking Impersonation and Dodging Attacks on Face Recognition Systemscited by 7
- 2023Face Encryption via Frequency-Restricted Identity-Agnostic Attackscited by 6
- 2023Segue: Side-information Guided Generative Unlearnable Examples for Facial Privacy Protection in Real Worldcited by 6
- 2023A Comprehensive Study on the Robustness of Image Classification and Object Detection in Remote Sensing: Surveying and Benchmarkingcited by 5
- 2024Embodied Active Defense: Leveraging Recurrent Feedback to Counter Adversarial Patchescited by 4
- 2024Adversarial Attacks on Both Face Recognition and Face Anti-spoofing Modelscited by 4
- 2024A Survey on Physical Adversarial Attacks against Face Recognition Systemscited by 4
- 2024DynamicPAE: Generating Scene-Aware Physical Adversarial Examples in Real-Timecited by 4
21 more
- 2025Beyond Vulnerabilities: A Survey of Adversarial Attacks as Both Threats and Defenses in Computer Vision Systemscited by 4
- 2023Distributional Modeling for Location-Aware Adversarial Patchescited by 3
- 2024Attack Anything: Blind DNNs via Universal Background Adversarial Attackcited by 3
- 2024Improving the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks on Face Recognition with Diverse Parameters Augmentationcited by 3
- 2024Adversarial Attacks on Hyperbolic Networkscited by 3
- 2024Artificial Immune System of Secure Face Recognition Against Adversarial Attackscited by 2
- 2024Rethinking the Threat and Accessibility of Adversarial Attacks against Face Recognition Systemscited by 2
- 2025Learning Knowledge-based Prompts for Robust 3D Mask Presentation Attack Detectioncited by 2
- 2025Non-Adaptive Adversarial Face Generationcited by 2
- 2023Fool the Hydra: Adversarial Attacks against Multi-view Object Detection Systemscited by 1
- 2025Group-wise Scaling and Orthogonal Decomposition for Domain-Invariant Feature Extraction in Face Anti-Spoofingcited by 1
- 2025Reinforced Embodied Active Defense: Exploiting Adaptive Interaction for Robust Visual Perception in Adversarial 3D Environmentscited by 1
- 2025Explainable AI for Analyzing Person-Specific Patterns in Facial Recognition Taskscited by 1
- 2026Adv-TGD: Adversarial Text-Guided Diffusion for Face Recognition Impersonation Attackscited by 1
- 2023Trainwreck: A damaging adversarial attack on image classifierscited by 0
- 2024FaceCat: Enhancing Face Recognition Security with a Unified Diffusion Modelcited by 0
- 2025SAP-DIFF: Semantic Adversarial Patch Generation for Black-Box Face Recognition Models via Diffusion Modelscited by 0
- 2025GFT-GCN: Privacy-Preserving 3D Face Mesh Recognition with Spectral Diffusioncited by 0
- 2026Adversarial Camouflagecited by 0
- 20263D FaceShell: Attribute Transfer in 3D Face Avatars as a VLM Defense Mechanismcited by 0
- 2026Face De-Identification: A Domain-Centric Survey from Capture to Processingcited by 0
- 2026Face De-Identification: A Domain-Centric Survey from Capture to Processing28 Jul 2026
- 20263D FaceShell: Attribute Transfer in 3D Face Avatars as a VLM Defense Mechanism9 Jul 2026
- 2026Adv-TGD: Adversarial Text-Guided Diffusion for Face Recognition Impersonation Attacks10 Jun 2026
- 2026Adversarial Camouflage23 Mar 2026
- 2025GFT-GCN: Privacy-Preserving 3D Face Mesh Recognition with Spectral Diffusion25 Nov 2025
- 2025Explainable AI for Analyzing Person-Specific Patterns in Facial Recognition Tasks22 Sep 2025
- 2025Beyond Vulnerabilities: A Survey of Adversarial Attacks as Both Threats and Defenses in Computer Vision Systems3 Aug 2025
- 2025Reinforced Embodied Active Defense: Exploiting Adaptive Interaction for Robust Visual Perception in Adversarial 3D Environments24 Jul 2025
- 2025Non-Adaptive Adversarial Face Generation16 Jul 2025
- 2025Group-wise Scaling and Orthogonal Decomposition for Domain-Invariant Feature Extraction in Face Anti-Spoofing5 Jul 2025
- 2025Learning Knowledge-based Prompts for Robust 3D Mask Presentation Attack Detection6 May 2025
- 2025SAP-DIFF: Semantic Adversarial Patch Generation for Black-Box Face Recognition Models via Diffusion Models27 Feb 2025
21 more
- 2025UV-Attack: Physical-World Adversarial Attacks for Person Detection via Dynamic-NeRF-based UV Mapping10 Jan 2025
- 2024DynamicPAE: Generating Scene-Aware Physical Adversarial Examples in Real-Time11 Dec 2024
- 2024Adversarial Attacks on Hyperbolic Networks2 Dec 2024
- 2024Improving the Transferability of Adversarial Attacks on Face Recognition with Diverse Parameters Augmentation23 Nov 2024
- 2024A Survey on Physical Adversarial Attacks against Face Recognition Systems10 Oct 2024
- 2024Attack Anything: Blind DNNs via Universal Background Adversarial Attack17 Aug 2024
- 2024Rethinking the Threat and Accessibility of Adversarial Attacks against Face Recognition Systems11 Jul 2024
- 2024Artificial Immune System of Secure Face Recognition Against Adversarial Attacks26 Jun 2024
- 2024Adversarial Attacks on Both Face Recognition and Face Anti-spoofing Models27 May 2024
- 2024FaceCat: Enhancing Face Recognition Security with a Unified Diffusion Model14 Apr 2024
- 2024Embodied Active Defense: Leveraging Recurrent Feedback to Counter Adversarial Patches31 Mar 2024
- 2024Artwork Protection Against Neural Style Transfer Using Locally Adaptive Adversarial Color Attack18 Jan 2024
- 2024Rethinking Impersonation and Dodging Attacks on Face Recognition Systems17 Jan 2024
- 2023Fool the Hydra: Adversarial Attacks against Multi-view Object Detection Systems30 Nov 2023
- 2023Trainwreck: A damaging adversarial attack on image classifiers24 Nov 2023
- 2023Adversarial Examples in the Physical World: A Survey1 Nov 2023
- 2023Segue: Side-information Guided Generative Unlearnable Examples for Facial Privacy Protection in Real World24 Oct 2023
- 2023Face Encryption via Frequency-Restricted Identity-Agnostic Attacks11 Aug 2023
- 2023Distributional Modeling for Location-Aware Adversarial Patches28 Jun 2023
- 2023A Comprehensive Study on the Robustness of Image Classification and Object Detection in Remote Sensing: Surveying and Benchmarking21 Jun 2023
- 2023Physical Adversarial Attacks for Surveillance: A Survey1 May 2023
- 2026Adv-TGD: Adversarial Text-Guided Diffusion for Face Recognition Impersonation Attackscited by 1
- 2024FaceCat: Enhancing Face Recognition Security with a Unified Diffusion Modelcited by 0
- 2025SAP-DIFF: Semantic Adversarial Patch Generation for Black-Box Face Recognition Models via Diffusion Modelscited by 0
- 2026Adv-TGD: Adversarial Text-Guided Diffusion for Face Recognition Impersonation Attacks10 Jun 2026
- 2025SAP-DIFF: Semantic Adversarial Patch Generation for Black-Box Face Recognition Models via Diffusion Models27 Feb 2025
- 2024FaceCat: Enhancing Face Recognition Security with a Unified Diffusion Model14 Apr 2024
- 2023Physical Adversarial Attacks for Surveillance: A Surveycited by 15
- 2023Adversarial Examples in the Physical World: A Surveycited by 10
- 2024Artwork Protection Against Neural Style Transfer Using Locally Adaptive Adversarial Color Attackcited by 9
- 2025UV-Attack: Physical-World Adversarial Attacks for Person Detection via Dynamic-NeRF-based UV Mappingcited by 8
- 2024Rethinking Impersonation and Dodging Attacks on Face Recognition Systemscited by 7
- 2023Face Encryption via Frequency-Restricted Identity-Agnostic Attackscited by 6
- 2023Segue: Side-information Guided Generative Unlearnable Examples for Facial Privacy Protection in Real Worldcited by 6
- 2023A Comprehensive Study on the Robustness of Image Classification and Object Detection in Remote Sensing: Surveying and Benchmarkingcited by 5
- 2024Embodied Active Defense: Leveraging Recurrent Feedback to Counter Adversarial Patchescited by 4
- 2024Adversarial Attacks on Both Face Recognition and Face Anti-spoofing Modelscited by 4
- 2024A Survey on Physical Adversarial Attacks against Face Recognition Systemscited by 4
- 2024DynamicPAE: Generating Scene-Aware Physical Adversarial Examples in Real-Timecited by 4
12 most cited of 29 All 29 (JSON)
- 2026Face De-Identification: A Domain-Centric Survey from Capture to Processing28 Jul 2026
- 20263D FaceShell: Attribute Transfer in 3D Face Avatars as a VLM Defense Mechanism9 Jul 2026
- 2026Adversarial Camouflage23 Mar 2026
- 2025GFT-GCN: Privacy-Preserving 3D Face Mesh Recognition with Spectral Diffusion25 Nov 2025
- 2025Explainable AI for Analyzing Person-Specific Patterns in Facial Recognition Tasks22 Sep 2025
- 2025Beyond Vulnerabilities: A Survey of Adversarial Attacks as Both Threats and Defenses in Computer Vision Systems3 Aug 2025
- 2025Reinforced Embodied Active Defense: Exploiting Adaptive Interaction for Robust Visual Perception in Adversarial 3D Environments24 Jul 2025
- 2025Non-Adaptive Adversarial Face Generation16 Jul 2025
- 2025Group-wise Scaling and Orthogonal Decomposition for Domain-Invariant Feature Extraction in Face Anti-Spoofing5 Jul 2025
- 2025UV-Attack: Physical-World Adversarial Attacks for Person Detection via Dynamic-NeRF-based UV Mapping10 Jan 2025
- 2024DynamicPAE: Generating Scene-Aware Physical Adversarial Examples in Real-Time11 Dec 2024
- 2024Adversarial Attacks on Hyperbolic Networks2 Dec 2024
12 newest of 29 All 29 (JSON)