Technical solutions
Results
iMARS develops solutions to better detect document fraud and image manipulation forgeries, in the ID document life cycle – from issuance to verification – and forensic investigation, that are:
- Efficient and fast for operators and travelers.
- Simple, low-cost, compatible with existing systems and user-friendly.
Those technical solutions include:
- State-of-the-art image manipulation and Morphing Attack Detection solutions
- Document Verification and Fraud Detection solutions.
We also create strategies to defend the authenticity of alphanumeric and photo data, confirm data integrity and detect image manipulations. And we develop technical solutions to ensure more secure verification of identities by integrating Morphing Attack Detection, Document Verification and Fraud Detection software in both Automated Border Control gates and in the back-end of enrolment systems. These solutions will support human experts in their decision making in an assisted manner.
Impact
Our solutions lead to:
- Increased security at European Union level
- Supporting security practitioners by semi-automatically verifying ID documents, searching for forgeries and very recent document frauds, providing them with insights on the way detection algorithms decide (training).
- Major impact on the services provided by each Member State to its citizens by strengthening the chain of identity and preventing them from being harmed without their knowledge.
- Increasing the European innovation capacity in the area of biometric recognition systems, forensic analysis, document security and border management.
- A re-establishment of societies’ confidence in the principle “one individual – one passport” and “one passport – one individual” by strengthening the chain of identity.
- Reproducible research by employing a unified software platform to allow standardised online evaluation.
Training
Results
- Raising awareness among border professionals and passport application officers of the overall issue of image morphing and image manipulation.
- Awareness about the vulnerability of Facial Recognition Systems to image manipulation attacks.
- Reinforcing end-users’ skills on iMARS solutions and transmitting professional expertise gained during the project.
Impact
- Training, guidelines and best practices will reinforce end-users’ skills on iMARS solutions and transmit professional expertise gained during the project.
- Ensuring that the technologies developed are not only accepted by border guards, passport application officers and forensic experts, but also accepted by citizens.
Standardisation
The iMARS results will be transferred to relevant standardisation bodies and technical committees, such as ICAO (on travel documents), ISO/IEC JTC1 SC37 (on biometrics) or CEN TC224 WG18, WG19 and EU Article 6 Committee.
Results
The iMARS project facilitates reproducible research by employing a unified software platform to allow for a standardised online evaluation. The standardisation results in clear, realistic and reproducible benchmarks against which to assess progress.
iMARS will ensure adaptation by these standardisation bodies for the following project results:
- travel document issuance procedures
- vulnerability assessment of biometric subsystems for morphing attacks
- face image quality assessment.
Impact
This will have an impact on:
- The directions of the future Research & Development work programmes related to the security domain and could lead to European rules and regulations that could directly impact member states as well as individual citizens.
- Enhanced standardization and interoperability of future iMARS-compliant Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) and Document Verification and Fraud Detection (DVFD) solutions will contribute to overcome the fragmentation of national markets and help maintaining global competitiveness of the European companies active in the MAD and DVFD market.
- Assessment of face image quality and the development of face quality metrics.
- Assessment of the implementation of face image quality metrics in the Schengen Information System.
- Best practice guidelines and recommendations to be included in the relevant publications to raise the sensibility for new kinds of forgeries such as image manipulations.