Detection of T-shirt Presentation Attacks in Face Recognition Systems

arXiv cs.CV / 4/22/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper investigates how face recognition biometric systems can be compromised by presentation attacks, focusing specifically on T-shirt-based attacks from the TFPA database.
  • Using 1,608 T-shirt attack samples generated with 100 different attack instruments and 152 bona fide presentations, the study demonstrates that this attack type can effectively undermine face recognition security.
  • It evaluates the generalization challenge of presentation attack detection and shows that existing solutions may struggle when encountering novel attack styles.
  • The authors propose a new detection approach that applies spatial consistency checks by combining state-of-the-art face and person detectors to identify the spatial relationships indicative of T-shirt attacks.

Abstract

Face recognition systems are often used for biometric authentication. Nevertheless, it is known that without any protective measures, face recognition systems are vulnerable to presentation attacks. To tackle this security problem, methods for detecting presentation attacks have been developed and shown good detection performance on several benchmark datasets. However, generalising presentation attack detection methods to new and novel types of attacks is an ongoing challenge. In this work, we employ 1,608 T-shirt attacks of the T-shirt Face Presentation Attack (TFPA) database using 100 unique presentation attack instruments together with 152 bona fide presentations. In a comprehensive evaluation, we show that this type of attack can compromise the security of face recognition systems. Furthermore, we propose a detection method based on spatial consistency checks in order to detect said T-shirt attacks. Precisely, state-of-the-art face and person detectors are combined to analyse the spatial positions of detected faces and persons based on which T-shirt attacks can be reliably detected.