A Deep, Information-theoretic Framework for Robust Biometric Recognition

TL;DR

This paper introduces an information-theoretic framework that enhances the robustness of biometric recognition systems against adversarial attacks while improving overall recognition accuracy.

Contribution

It adapts the deep variational information bottleneck method specifically for biometric recognition to improve robustness and performance.

Findings

Increased robustness against adversarial attacks.

Improved recognition accuracy over existing methods.

Effective feature learning for biometric security.

Abstract

Deep neural networks (DNN) have been a de facto standard for nowadays biometric recognition solutions. A serious, but still overlooked problem in these DNN-based recognition systems is their vulnerability against adversarial attacks. Adversarial attacks can easily cause the output of a DNN system to greatly distort with only tiny changes in its input. Such distortions can potentially lead to an unexpected match between a valid biometric and a synthetic one constructed by a strategic attacker, raising security issue. In this work, we show how this issue can be resolved by learning robust biometric features through a deep, information-theoretic framework, which builds upon the recent deep variational information bottleneck method but is carefully adapted to biometric recognition tasks. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that our method not only offers stronger robustness against adversarial attacks but also provides better recognition performance over state-of-the-art approaches.