Yonghang Tai

Lin Li, Chao Chen, Lei Pan et al.

Recently, physiological signal-based biometric systems have received wide attention. Unlike traditional biometric features, physiological signals can not be easily compromised (usually unobservable to human eyes). Photoplethysmography (PPG) signal is easy to measure, making it more attractive than many other physiological signals for biometric authentication. However, with the advent of remote PPG (rPPG), unobservability has been challenged when the attacker can remotely steal the rPPG signals by monitoring the victim's face, subsequently posing a threat to PPG-based biometrics. In PPG-based biometric authentication, current attack approaches mandate the victim's PPG signal, making rPPG-based attacks neglected. In this paper, we firstly analyze the security of PPG-based biometrics, including user authentication and communication protocols. We evaluate the signal waveforms, heart rate and inter-pulse-interval information extracted by five rPPG methods, including four traditional optical computing methods (CHROM, POS, LGI, PCA) and one deep learning method (CL_rPPG). We conducted experiments on five datasets (PURE, UBFC_rPPG, UBFC_Phys, LGI_PPGI, and COHFACE) to collect a comprehensive set of results. Our empirical studies show that rPPG poses a serious threat to the authentication system. The success rate of the rPPG signal spoofing attack in the user authentication system reached 0.35. The bit hit rate is 0.6 in inter-pulse-interval-based security protocols. Further, we propose an active defence strategy to hide the physiological signals of the face to resist the attack. It reduces the success rate of rPPG spoofing attacks in user authentication to 0.05. The bit hit rate was reduced to 0.5, which is at the level of a random guess. Our strategy effectively prevents the exposure of PPG signals to protect users' sensitive physiological data.

Qiyu Xu, Zhanxuan Hu, Yu Duan et al.

Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) aims to classify unlabeled data from both known and unknown categories by leveraging knowledge from labeled known categories. While existing methods have made notable progress, they often overlook a hidden stumbling block in GCD: distracted attention. Specifically, when processing unlabeled data, models tend to focus not only on key objects in the image but also on task-irrelevant background regions, leading to suboptimal feature extraction. To remove this stumbling block, we propose Attention Focusing (AF), an adaptive mechanism designed to sharpen the model's focus by pruning non-informative tokens. AF consists of two simple yet effective components: Token Importance Measurement (TIME) and Token Adaptive Pruning (TAP), working in a cascade. TIME quantifies token importance across multiple scales, while TAP prunes non-informative tokens by utilizing the multi-scale importance scores provided by TIME. AF is a lightweight, plug-and-play module that integrates seamlessly into existing GCD methods with minimal computational overhead. When incorporated into one prominent GCD method, SimGCD, AF achieves up to 15.4% performance improvement over the baseline with minimal computational overhead. The implementation code is provided in https://github.com/Afleve/AFGCD.