Printed and Scanned: Exposing the Fragility of Single-Image Morphing Attack Detectors under Print-Scan Degradation

Diogo J. Paulo, Hugo Proença, João C. Neves

Face morphing attacks, in which the biometric traits of two or more identities are blended into a single face image, pose a severe threat to identity document issuance and automated border control. Consequently, a large body of work has proposed Single-image Morphing Attack Detection (S-MAD) algorithms and benchmarked them on datasets such as SYN-MAD22. However, the majority of these benchmarks operate exclusively in the digital domain, which contrasts with the real-world passport issuance pipeline in some countries, which still requires an applicant-supplied photograph to be printed and subsequently re-scanned before it is embedded in the identity document or fed into an automated verification system. This print-scan step introduces halftoning, resampling, color-space, and sensor noise that are absent from digital pipelines, and may mask the high-frequency artifacts that S-MAD models rely on. In this work, we introduce a print-scan version of the SYN-MAD22 dataset, obtained by printing and re-scanning all bona fide and morphed images at 300 and 600 DPI, and we use it to evaluate eight state-of-the-art S-MAD models trained exclusively on digital data. We additionally repeat the…