Improving deep-learning-based face recognition to increase robustness against morphing attacks

State-of-the-art face recognition systems (FRS) are vulnerable to morphing attacks, in which two photos of different people are merged in such a way that the resulting photo resembles both people. Such a photo could be used to apply for a passport, allowing both people to travel with the same identity document. Research has so far focussed on developing morphing detection methods. We suggest that it might instead be worthwhile to make face recognition systems themselves more robust to morphing attacks. We show that deep-learning-based face recognition can be improved simply by treating morphed images just like real images during training but also that, for significant improvements, more work is needed. Furthermore, we test the performance of our FRS on morphs of a type not seen during training. This addresses the problem of overfitting to the type of morphs used during training, which is often overlooked in current research.