Simulation of Border Control in an Ongoing Web-based Experiment for Estimating Morphing Detection Performance of Humans

Abstract

A morphed face image injected into an identity document destroys the unique link between a person and a document meaning that such a multi-identity document may be successfully used by several persons for face-recognition-based identity verification. A morphed face in an electronic machine readable travel document may allow a wanted criminal to illicitly cross a border. This paper describes an improvement of our ongoing web-based experiment for a border control simulation in which human examiners should first detect high-resolution morphed face images and second match potentially morphed document images against "live" faces of travelers. The error rates of humans in both parts of the experiment are compared with those of automated morphing detectors and face recognition systems. This experiment improves understanding the capabilities and limits of humans in withstanding the face morphing attack as well as the factors influencing their performance.