Masked Faces with Faced Masks

Abstract

Modern face recognition systems (FRS) still fall short when the subjects are wearing facial masks. An intuitive partial remedy is to add a mask detector to flag any masked faces so that the FRS can act accordingly for those low-confidence masked faces. In this work, we set out to investigate the potential vulnerability of such FRS equipped with a mask detector, on large-scale masked faces, which might trigger a serious risk, e.g., letting a suspect evade the facial identity from FRS and not detected by mask detectors simultaneously. We formulate the new task as the generation of realistic & adversarial-faced mask and make three main contributions: First, we study the naive Delaunay-based masking method (DM) to simulate the process of wearing a faced mask, which reveals the main challenges of this new task. Second, we further equip the DM with the adversarial noise attack and propose the adversarial noise Delaunay-based masking method (AdvNoise-DM) that can fool the face recognition and mask detection effectively but make the face less natural. Third, we propose the adversarial filtering Delaunay-based masking method denoted as MF 2M by employing the adversarial filtering for AdvNoise-DM and obtain more natural faces. With the above efforts, the final version not only leads to significant performance deterioration of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep learning-based FRS, but also remains undetected by the SOTA facial mask detector simultaneously.