Face Recognition Systems (FRS) are increasingly vulnerable to face-morphing attacks, prompting the development of Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) algorithms. However, a key challenge in MAD lies in its limited generalizability to unseen data and its lack of explainability-critical for practical application environments such as enrolment stations and automated border control systems. Recognizing that most existing MAD algorithms rely on supervised learning paradigms, this work explores a novel approach to MAD using zero-shot learning leveraged on Large Language Models (LLMs). We propose two types of zero-shot MAD algorithms: one leveraging general vision models and the other utilizing multimodal LLMs. For general vision models, we address the MAD task by computing the mean support embedding of an independent support set without using morphed images. For the LLM-based approach, we employ the state-of-the-art GPT-4 Turbo API with carefully crafted prompts. To evaluate the feasibility of zero-shot MAD and the effectiveness of the proposed methods, we constructed a print-scan morph dataset featuring various unseen morphing algorithms, simulating challenging real-world application scenarios. Experimental results demonstrated notable detection accuracy, validating the applicability of zero-shot learning for MAD tasks. Additionally, our investigation into LLM-based MAD revealed that multimodal LLMs, such as ChatGPT, exhibit remarkable generalizability to untrained MAD tasks. Furthermore, they possess a unique ability to provide explanations and guidance, which can enhance transparency and usability for end-users in practical applications.

Pathology detection in Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) using deep learning has been explored in the recent past. However, deep learning models can be influenced by the color quality of the dataset used to train them, impacting detection, segmentation and classification tasks. In this work, we evaluate the impact of color correction on pathology detection using two prominent object detection models: Retinanet and YOLOv5. We first generate two color corrected versions of a popular WCE dataset (i.e., SEE-AI dataset) using two different color correction functions. We then evaluate the performance of the Retinanet and YOLOv5 on the original and color corrected versions of the dataset. The results reveal that color correction makes the models generate larger bounding boxes and larger intersection areas with the ground truth annotations. Furthermore, color correction leads to an increased number of false positives for certain pathologies. However, these effects do not translate into a consistent improvement in performance metrics such as F1-scores, IoU, and AP50.

Face morphing attacks have posed severe threats to Face Recognition Systems (FRS), which are operated in border control and passport issuance use cases. Correspondingly, morphing attack detection algorithms (MAD) are needed to defend against such attacks. MAD approaches must be robust enough to handle unknown attacks in an open-set scenario where attacks can originate from various morphing generation algorithms, post-processing and the diversity of printers/scanners. The problem of generalization is further pronounced when the detection has to be made on a single suspected image. In this paper, we propose a generalized single-image-based MAD (S-MAD) algorithm by learning the encoding from Vision Transformer (ViT) architecture. Compared to CNN-based architectures, ViT model has the advantage on integrating local and global information and hence can be suitable to detect the morphing traces widely distributed among the face region. Extensive experiments are carried out on face morphing datasets generated using publicly available FRGC face datasets. Several state-of-the-art (SOTA) MAD algorithms, including representative ones that have been publicly evaluated, have been selected and benchmarked with our ViT-based approach. Obtained results demonstrate the improved detection performance of the proposed S-MAD method on inter-dataset testing (when different data is used for training and testing) and comparable performance on intra-dataset testing (when the same data is used for training and testing) experimental protocol.

Fair operational systems are crucial in gaining and maintaining society's trust in face recognition systems (FRS). FRS start with capturing an image and assessing its quality before using it further for enrollment or verification. Fair Face Image Quality Assessment (FIQA) schemes therefore become equally important in the context of fair FRS. This work examines the sclera as a quality assessment region for obtaining a fair FIQA. The sclera region is agnostic to demographic variations and skin colour for assessing the quality of a face image. We analyze three skin tone related ISO/IEC face image quality assessment measures and assess the sclera region as an alternative area for assessing FIQ. Our analysis of the face dataset of individuals from different demographic groups representing different skin tones indicates sclera as an alternative to measure dynamic range, over- and under-exposure of face using sclera region alone. The sclera region being agnostic to skin tone, i.e., demographic factors, provides equal utility as a fair FIQA as shown by our Error-vs-Discard Characteristic (EDC) curve analysis.

Abnormalities in the gastrointestinal tract significantly influence the patient's health and require a timely diagnosis for effective treatment. With such consideration, an effective automatic classification of these abnormalities from a video capsule endoscopy (VCE) frame is crucial for improvement in diagnostic workflows. The work presents the process of developing and evaluating a novel model designed to classify gastrointestinal anomalies from a VCE video frame. Integration of Omni Dimensional Gated Attention (OGA) mechanism and Wavelet transformation techniques into the model's architecture allowed the model to focus on the most critical areas in the endoscopy images, reducing noise and irrelevant features. This is particularly advantageous in capsule endoscopy, where images often contain a high degree of variability in texture and color. Wavelet transformations contributed by efficiently capturing spatial and frequency-domain information, improving feature extraction, especially for detecting subtle features from the VCE frames. Furthermore, the features extracted from the Stationary Wavelet Transform and Discrete Wavelet Transform are concatenated channel-wise to capture multiscale features, which are essential for detecting polyps, ulcerations, and bleeding. This approach improves classification accuracy on imbalanced capsule endoscopy datasets. The proposed model achieved 92.76% and 91.19% as training and validation accuracies respectively. At the same time, Training and Validation losses are 0.2057 and 0.2700. The proposed model achieved a Balanced Accuracy of 94.81%, AUC of 87.49%, F1-score of 91.11%, precision of 91.17%, recall of 91.19% and specificity of 98.44%. Additionally, the model's performance is benchmarked against two base models, VGG16 and ResNet50, demonstrating its enhanced ability to identify and classify a range of gastrointestinal abnormalities accurately.

The importance of quantifying uncertainty in deep networks has become paramount for reliable real-world applications. In this paper, we propose a method to improve uncertainty estimation in medical Image-to-Image (I2I) translation. Our model integrates aleatoric uncertainty and employs Uncertainty-Aware Regularization (UAR) inspired by simple priors to refine uncertainty estimates and enhance reconstruction quality. We show that by leveraging simple priors on parameters, our approach captures more robust uncertainty maps, effectively refining them to indicate precisely where the network encounters difficulties, while being less affected by noise. Our experiments demonstrate that UAR not only improves translation performance, but also provides better uncertainty estimations, particularly in the presence of noise and artifacts. We validate our approach using two medical imaging datasets, showcasing its effectiveness in maintaining high confidence in familiar regions while accurately identifying areas of uncertainty in novel/ambiguous scenarios.

Numerous studies have shown that existing Face Recognition Systems (FRS), including commercial ones, often exhibit biases toward certain ethnicities due to under-represented data. In this work, we explore ethnicity alteration and skin tone modification using synthetic face image generation methods to increase the diversity of datasets. We conduct a detailed analysis by first constructing a balanced face image dataset representing three ethnicities: Asian, Black, and Indian. We then make use of existing Generative Adversarial Network-based (GAN) image-to-image translation and manifold learning models to alter the ethnicity from one to another. A systematic analysis is further conducted to assess the suitability of such datasets for FRS by studying the realistic skin-tone representation using Individual Typology Angle (ITA). Further, we also analyze the quality characteristics using existing Face image quality assessment (FIQA) approaches. We then provide a holistic FRS performance analysis using four different systems. Our findings pave the way for future research works in (i) developing both specific ethnicity and general (any to any) ethnicity alteration models, (ii) expanding such approaches to create databases with diverse skin tones, (iii) creating datasets representing various ethnicities which further can help in mitigating bias while addressing privacy concerns.

Face inpainting, the technique of restoring missing or damaged regions in facial images, is pivotal for applications like face recognition in occluded scenarios and image analysis with poor-quality captures. This process not only needs to produce realistic visuals but also preserve individual identity characteristics. The aim of this paper is to inpaint a face given periocular region (eyes-to-face) through a proposed new Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based model called Eyes-to-Face Network (E2F-Net). The proposed approach extracts identity and non-identity features from the periocular region using two dedicated encoders have been used. The extracted features are then mapped to the latent space of a pre-trained StyleGAN generator to benefit from its state-of-the-art performance and its rich, diverse and expressive latent space without any additional training. We further improve the StyleGAN output to find the optimal code in the latent space using a new optimization for GAN inversion technique. Our E2F-Net requires a minimum training process reducing the computational complexity as a secondary benefit. Through extensive experiments, we show that our method successfully reconstructs the whole face with high quality, surpassing current techniques, despite significantly less training and supervision efforts. We have generated seven eyes-to-face datasets based on well-known public face datasets for training and verifying our proposed methods. The code and datasets are publicly available.

Face image quality assessment refers to the process of evaluating the utility of a face image for face recognition. It involves analyzing various quality factors that may impact the recognition performance. The quality measures produced from analyzing the image can be in the form of individual quality components, such as background uniformity, illumination uniformity, pose, exposure, dynamic range, sharpness, facial expressions, or in the form of a unified quality score. The ISO/IEC CD on 29794-5 [IS] (Information technology -- Biometric sample quality -- Part 5: Face image data) specifies that a face image quality assessment algorithm should be insensitive to demographic factors such as age, skin-tone or ethnicity. The eye sclera refers to the outer layer of the eyeball surrounding the iris. It is the opaque, whitish portion of the eye that surrounds the colored iris and the dark circular opening called the pupil. Figure 1 illustrates the anatomy of the eye including the sclera. This characteristic of being whitish in color regardless of age, ethnicity and skin-tone [Ka23] is what makes it interesting for the task of face image quality assessment. Analyzing the eye sclera in a face image can help in making the quality assessment algorithms of some of the face image quality components invariant to skin-tone and ethnicity.

In recent years, image and video manipulations with Deepfake have become a severe concern for security and society. Many detection models and datasets have been proposed to detect Deepfake data reliably. However, there is an increased concern that these models and training databases might be biased and, thus, cause Deepfake detectors to fail. In this work, we investigate the bias issue caused by public Deepfake datasets by (a) providing large-scale demographic and non-demographic attribute annotations of 47 different attributes for five popular Deepfake datasets and (b) comprehensively analysing AI-bias of three state-of-the-art Deepfake detection backbone models on these datasets. The investigation analyses the influence of a large variety of distinctive attributes (from over 65M labels) on the detection performance, including demographic (age, gender, ethnicity) and non-demographic (hair, skin, accessories, etc.) information. The results indicate that investigated databases lack diversity and, more importantly, show that the utilised Deepfake detection backbone models are strongly biased towards many investigated attributes. The Deepfake detection backbone methods, which are trained with biased datasets, might output incorrect detection results, thereby leading to generalisability, fairness, and security issues. We hope that the findings of this study and the annotation databases will help to evaluate and mitigate bias in future Deepfake detection techniques. The annotation datasets and the corresponding code are publicly available.