Naser Damer

• Doctor of Engineering
• Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research

This work presents a novel solution for multivariate time series anomaly detection in industrial control systems (ICSs), specifically tailored for resource‐constrained environments. At its core, the quantized gated recurrent unit variational autoencoder (Q‐GRU‐VAE) architecture, a significant evolution from conventional methods, offers an extremely...

Recent advances in generative modeling have enabled the generation of high-quality synthetic data that is applicable in a variety of domains, including face recognition. Here, state-of-the-art generative models typically rely on conditioning and fine-tuning of powerful pretrained diffusion models to facilitate the synthesis of realistic images of a...

With the continuous advancement of generative models, face morphing attacks have become a significant challenge for existing face verification systems due to their potential use in identity fraud and other malicious activities. Contemporary Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) approaches frequently rely on supervised, discriminative models trained on ex...

Face recognition (FR) models are vulnerable to performance variations across demographic groups. The causes for these performance differences are unclear due to the highly complex deep learning-based structure of face recognition models. Several works aimed at exploring possible roots of gender and ethnicity bias, identifying semantic reasons such...

Despite the considerable performance improvements of face recognition algorithms in recent years, the same scientific advances responsible for this progress can also be used to create efficient ways to attack them, posing a threat to their secure deployment. Morphing attack detection (MAD) systems aim to detect a specific type of threat, morphing a...

Although face recognition systems have seen a massive performance enhancement in recent years, they are still targeted by threats such as presentation attacks, leading to the need for generalizable presentation attack detection (PAD) algorithms. Current PAD solutions suffer from two main problems: low generalization to unknown cenarios and large tr...

This article presents the Keystroke Verification Challenge - onGoing (KVC-onGoing), on which researchers can easily benchmark their systems in a common platform using large-scale public databases, the Aalto University Keystroke databases, and a standard experimental protocol. The keystroke data consist of tweet-long sequences of variable transcript...

Synthetic data is gaining increasing popularity for face recognition technologies, mainly due to the privacy concerns and challenges associated with obtaining real data, including diverse scenarios, quality, and demographic groups, among others. It also offers some advantages over real data, such as the large amount of data that can be generated or...

Foundation models are predominantly trained in an unsupervised or self-supervised manner on highly diverse and large-scale datasets, making them broadly applicable to various downstream tasks. In this work, we investigate for the first time whether such models are suitable for the specific domain of face recognition. We further propose and demonstr...

Contactless fingerprint recognition is an emerging biometric technology that has several advantages over contact-based schemes, such as improved user acceptance and fewer hygienic concerns. Like for most other biometrics, Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) is crucial to preserving the trustworthiness of contactless fingerprint recognition methods....

This paper summarises the Competition on Presentation Attack Detection on ID Cards (PAD-IDCard) held at the 2024 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB2024). The competition attracted a total of ten registered teams, both from academia and industry. In the end, the participating teams submitted five valid submissions, with eight models...

Drowsiness detection holds paramount importance in ensuring safety in workplaces or behind the wheel, enhancing productivity, and healthcare across diverse domains. Therefore accurate and real-time drowsiness detection plays a critical role in preventing accidents, enhancing safety, and ultimately saving lives across various sectors and scenarios....

The need for more transparent face recognition (FR), along with other visual-based decision-making systems has recently attracted more attention in research, society, and industry. The reasons why two face images are matched or not matched by a deep learning-based face recognition system are not obvious due to the high number of parameters and the...

The use of synthetic data for training neural networks has recently received increased attention, especially in the area of face recognition. This was mainly motivated by the increase of privacy, ethical, and legal concerns of using privacy-sensitive authentic data to train face recognition models. Many authentic datasets such as MS-Celeb-1M or VGG...

Knowledge distillation (KD) aims at improving the performance of a compact student model by distilling the knowledge from a high-performing teacher model. In this paper, we present an adaptive KD approach, namely AdaDistill, for deep face recognition. The proposed AdaDistill embeds the KD concept into the softmax loss by training the student using...

This article discusses the state of the art in periocular biometrics, presenting an overall framework encompassing the field’s most significant research aspects, which include ocular definition, acquisition, and detection; identity recognition; and ocular soft-biometric analysis.

Large-scale face recognition datasets are collected by crawling the Internet and without individuals' consent, raising legal, ethical, and privacy concerns. With the recent advances in generative models, recently several works proposed generating synthetic face recognition datasets to mitigate concerns in web-crawled face recognition datasets. This...

Recent advances in deep face recognition have spurred a growing demand for large, diverse, and manually annotated face datasets. Acquiring authentic, high-quality data for face recognition has proven to be a challenge, primarily due to privacy concerns. Large face datasets are primarily sourced from web-based images, lacking explicit user consent....

This article presents FRCSyn-onGoing, an ongoing challenge for face recognition where researchers can easily benchmark their systems against the state of the art in an open common platform using large-scale public databases and standard experimental protocols. FRCSyn-onGoing is based on the Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (F...

Anomaly detection is a critical task in ensuring the security and safety of infrastructure and individuals in smart environments. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of recent anomaly detection solutions in data streams supporting smart environments, with a specific focus on multivariate time series anomaly detection in various environment...

Drowsiness detection holds paramount importance in ensuring safety in workplaces or behind the wheel, enhancing productivity, and healthcare across diverse domains. Therefore accurate and real-time drowsiness detection plays a critical role in preventing accidents, enhancing safety, and ultimately saving lives across various sectors and scenarios....

Recent advancements in ubiquitous computing have emphasized the need for privacy-preserving occupancy detection in smart environments to enhance security. This work presents a novel occupancy detection solution utilizing privacy-aware sensing technologies. The solution analyzes time-series data to detect not only occupancy as a binary problem, but...

Face morphing attack detection is emerging as an increasingly challenging problem owing to advancements in high-quality and realistic morphing attack generation. Reliable detection of morphing attacks is essential because these attacks are targeted for border control applications. This paper presents a multispectral framework for differential morph...

Recent face presentation attack detection (PAD) leverages domain adaptation (DA) and domain generalization (DG) techniques to address performance degradation on unknown domains. However, DA-based PAD methods require access to unlabeled target data, while most DG-based PAD solutions rely on a priori, i.e., known domain labels. Moreover, most DA-/DG-...

The availability of large-scale authentic face databases has been crucial to the significant advances made in face recognition research over the past decade. However, legal and ethical concerns led to the recent retraction of many of these databases by their creators, raising questions about the continuity of future face recognition research withou...

This paper presents the summary of the Efficient Face Recognition Competition (EFaR) held at the 2023 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2023). The competition received 17 submissions from 6 different teams. To drive further development of efficient face recognition models, the submitted solutions are ranked based on a weighted scor...

Deep generative models have recently presented impressive results in generating realistic face images of random synthetic identities. To generate multiple samples of a certain synthetic identity, several previous works proposed to disentangle the latent space of GANs by incorporating additional supervision or regularization, enabling the manipulati...

Morphing attacks keep threatening biometric systems, especially face recognition systems. Over time they have become simpler to perform and more realistic, as such, the usage of deep learning systems to detect these attacks has grown. At the same time, there is a constant concern regarding the lack of interpretability of deep learning models. Balan...

Contemporary face recognition (FR) models achieve near-ideal recognition performance in constrained settings, yet do not fully translate the performance to unconstrained (realworld) scenarios. To help improve the performance and stability of FR systems in such unconstrained settings, face image quality assessment (FIQA) techniques try to infer samp...

Over the past years, deep learning capabilities and the availability of large-scale training datasets advanced rapidly, leading to breakthroughs in face recognition accuracy. However, these technologies are foreseen to face a major challenge in the next years due to the legal and ethical concerns about using authentic biometric data in AI model tra...

Many of the commonly used datasets for face recognition development are collected from the internet without proper user consent. Due to the increasing focus on privacy in the social and legal frameworks, the use and distribution of these datasets are being restricted and strongly questioned. These databases, which have a realistically high variabil...

Face recognition (FR) systems continue to spread in our daily lives with an increasing demand for higher explainability and interpretability of FR systems that are mainly based on deep learning. While bias across demographic groups in FR systems has already been studied, the bias of explainability tools has not yet been investigated. As such tools...

Explainable Face Recognition is gaining growing attention as the use of the technology is gaining ground in security-critical applications. Understanding why two faces images are matched or not matched by a given face recognition system is important to operators, users, anddevelopers to increase trust, accountability, develop better systems, and hi...

Face morphing attack detection is emerging as an increasingly challenging problem owing to advancements in high-quality and realistic morphing attack generation. Reliable detection of morphing attacks is essential because these attacks are targeted for border control applications. This paper presents a multispectral framework for differential morph...

In this work, we introduce the concept of pixel-level face image quality that determines the utility of single pixels in a face image for recognition. We propose a training-free approach to assess the pixel-level qualities of a face image given an arbitrary face recognition network. To achieve this, a model-specific quality value of the input image...

Recently, significant progress has been made in face presentation attack detection (PAD), which aims to secure face recognition systems against presentation attacks, owing to the availability of several face PAD datasets. However, all available datasets are based on privacy and legally-sensitive authentic biometric data with a limited number of sub...

Iris Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) is essential to secure iris recognition systems. Recent iris PAD solutions achieved good performance by leveraging deep learning techniques. However, most results were reported under intra-database scenarios, and it is unclear if such solutions can generalize well across databases and capture spectra. These...

Investigating new methods of creating face morphing attacks is essential to foresee novel attacks and help mitigate them. Creating morphing attacks is commonly either performed on the image-level or on the representation-level. The representation-level morphing has been performed so far based on generative adversarial networks (GAN) where the encod...

This work explores the potential applications of biometric recognition in 3D medical imaging data. We investigate various 3D imaging techniques commonly used in the medical domain, including 3D ultrasound imaging, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computer tomography (CT) scans, and 3D near-infrared (NIR) imaging. For each technique, we provide an...

Analyzing keystroke dynamics (KD) for biometric verification has several advantages: it is among the most discriminative behavioral traits; keyboards are among the most common human-computer interfaces, being the primary means for users to enter textual data; its acquisition does not require additional hardware, and its processing is relatively lig...

Periocular refers to the region of the face that surrounds the eye socket. This is a feature-rich area that can be used by itself to determine the identity of an individual. It is especially useful when the iris or the face cannot be reliably acquired. This can be the case of unconstrained or uncooperative scenarios, where the face may appear parti...

Since early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a considerable impact on many aspects of daily life. A range of different measures have been implemented worldwide to reduce the rate of new infections and to manage the pressure on national health services. A primary strategy has been to reduce gatherings and the potential for transmission through th...

Biometric technologies [1] have become an integral component of many personal, commercial, and governmental identity management systems worldwide. Biometrics rely on highly distinctive characteristics of human beings, which make it possible for individuals to be reliably recognized using fully automated algorithms. Prominent examples of biometric...

The emergence of COVID-19 has had a global and profound impact, not only on society as a whole, but also on the lives of individuals. Various prevention measures were introduced around the world to limit the transmission of the disease, including face masks, mandates for social distancing and regular disinfection in public spaces, and the use of sc...

Over the past years, the main research innovations in face recognition focused on training deep neural networks on large-scale identity-labeled datasets using variations of multi-class classification losses. However, many of these datasets are retreated by their creators due to increased privacy and ethical concerns. Very recently, privacy-friendly...

The emergence of COVID-19 has had a global and profound impact, not only on society as a whole, but also on the lives of individuals. Various prevention measures were introduced around the world to limit the transmission of the disease, including face masks, mandates for social distancing and regular disinfection in public spaces, and the use of sc...

Face Recognition (FR) is increasingly used in critical verification decisions and thus, there is a need for assessing the trustworthiness of such decisions. The confidence of a decision is often based on the overall performance of the model or on the image quality. We propose to propagate model uncertainties to scores and decisions in an effort to...