These authors contributed equally to this work.

The example shows the learned IT map with high w =2 0 approximating the ET map.

Developing reliable iris recognition and presentation attack detection methods requires diverse datasets that capture realistic variations in iris features and a wide spectrum of anomalies. Because of the rich texture of iris images, which spans a wide range of spatial frequencies, synthesizing same-identity iris images while controlling specific attributes remains challenging. In this work, we introduce a new iris image augmentation strategy by traversing a generative model's latent space toward latent codes that represent same-identity samples but with some desired iris image properties manipulated. The latent space traversal is guided by a gradient of specific geometrical, textural, or quality-related iris image features (e.g., sharpness, pupil size, iris size, or pupil-to-iris ratio) and preserves the identity represented by the image being manipulated. The proposed approach can be easily extended to manipulate any attribute for which a differentiable loss term can be formulated. Additionally, our approach can use either randomly generated images using either a pre-train GAN model or real-world iris images. W e can utilize GAN inversion to project any given iris image into the latent space and obtain its corresponding latent code.

The example shows the learned IT map with high w =2 0 approximating the ET map.

While recent works on blind face image restoration have successfully produced impressive high-quality (HQ) images with abundant details from low-quality (LQ) input images, the generated content may not accurately reflect the real appearance of a person. To address this problem, incorporating well-shot personal images as additional reference inputs could be a promising strategy. Inspired by the recent success of the Latent Diffusion Model (LDM), we propose ReF-LDM--an adaptation of LDM designed to generate HQ face images conditioned on one LQ image and multiple HQ reference images. Our model integrates an effective and efficient mechanism, CacheKV, to leverage the reference images during the generation process. Additionally, we design a timestep-scaled identity loss, enabling our LDM-based model to focus on learning the discriminating features of human faces. Lastly, we construct FFHQ-Ref, a dataset consisting of 20,405 high-quality (HQ) face images with corresponding reference images, which can serve as both training and evaluation data for reference-based face restoration models.

Morphing attacks are an emerging threat to state-of-the-art Face Recognition (FR) systems, which aim to create a single image that contains the biometric information of multiple identities. Diffusion Morphs (DiM) are a recently proposed morphing attack that has achieved state-of-the-art performance for representation-based morphing attacks. However, none of the existing research on DiMs have leveraged the iterative nature of DiMs and left the DiM model as a black box, treating it no differently than one would a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) or Varational AutoEncoder (VAE). We propose a greedy strategy on the iterative sampling process of DiM models which searches for an optimal step guided by an identity-based heuristic function. We compare our proposed algorithm against ten other state-of-the-art morphing algorithms using the open-source SYN-MAD 2022 competition dataset. We find that our proposed algorithm is unreasonably effective, fooling all of the tested FR systems with an MMPMR of 100%, outperforming all other morphing algorithms compared.

Combining face swapping with lip synchronization technology offers a cost-effective solution for customized talking face generation. However, directly cascading existing models together tends to introduce significant interference between tasks and reduce video clarity because the interaction space is limited to the low-level semantic RGB space. To address this issue, we propose an innovative unified framework, SwapTalk, which accomplishes both face swapping and lip synchronization tasks in the same latent space. Referring to recent work on face generation, we choose the VQ-embedding space due to its excellent editability and fidelity performance. To enhance the framework's generalization capabilities for unseen identities, we incorporate identity loss during the training of the face swapping module. Additionally, we introduce expert discriminator supervision within the latent space during the training of the lip synchronization module to elevate synchronization quality. In the evaluation phase, previous studies primarily focused on the self-reconstruction of lip movements in synchronous audio-visual videos. To better approximate real-world applications, we expand the evaluation scope to asynchronous audio-video scenarios. Furthermore, we introduce a novel identity consistency metric to more comprehensively assess the identity consistency over time series in generated facial videos. Experimental results on the HDTF demonstrate that our method significantly surpasses existing techniques in video quality, lip synchronization accuracy, face swapping fidelity, and identity consistency. Our demo is available at http://swaptalk.cc.