Reza Derakhshani

Babak Poorebrahim Gilkalaye, Shubhabrata Mukherjee, Reza Derakhshani

Generative AI has revolutionized modern machine learning by providing unprecedented realism, diversity, and efficiency in data generation. This technology holds immense potential for biometrics, including for securing sensitive and personally identifiable information. Given the irrevocability of biometric samples and mounting privacy concerns, biometric template security and secure matching are among the most sought-after features of modern biometric systems. This paper proposes a novel obfuscation method using Generative AI to enhance biometric template security. Our approach utilizes synthetic facial images generated by a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) as "random chaff points" within a secure vault system. Our method creates n sub-templates from the original template, each obfuscated with m GAN chaff points. During verification, s closest vectors to the biometric query are retrieved from each vault and combined to generate hash values, which are then compared with the stored hash value. Thus, our method safeguards user identities during the training and deployment phases by employing the GAN-generated synthetic images. Our protocol was tested using the AT&T, GT, and LFW face datasets, achieving ROC areas under the curve of 0.99, 0.99, and 0.90, respectively. Our results demonstrate that the proposed method can maintain high accuracy and reasonable computational complexity comparable to those unprotected template methods while significantly enhancing security and privacy, underscoring the potential of Generative AI in developing proactive defensive strategies for biometric systems.

Fernando Alonso-Fernandez, Reuben A. Farrugia, Julian Fierrez et al.

The lack of resolution has a negative impact on the performance of image-based biometrics. Many applications which are becoming ubiquitous in mobile devices do not operate in a controlled environment, and their performance significantly drops due to the lack of pixel resolution. While many generic super-resolution techniques have been studied to restore low-resolution images for biometrics, the results obtained are not always as desired. Those generic methods are usually aimed to enhance the visual appearance of the scene. However, producing an overall visual enhancement of biometric images does not necessarily correlate with a better recognition performance. Such techniques are designed to restore generic images and therefore do not exploit the specific structure found in biometric images (e.g. iris or faces), which causes the solution to be sub-optimal. For this reason, super-resolution techniques have to be adapted for the particularities of images from a specific biometric modality. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the application of super-resolution to different biometric modalities, such as face iris, gait or fingerprint. This chapter presents an overview of recent advances in super-resolution reconstruction of face and iris images, which are the two prevalent modalities in selfie biometrics. We also provide experimental results using several state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms, demonstrating the benefits of using super-resolution to improve the quality of face and iris images prior to classification. In the reported experiments, we study the application of super-resolution to face and iris images captured in the visible range, using experimental setups that represent well the selfie biometrics scenario.