Decoupling visual and identity features for adversarial palm-vein image attack

Palm-vein has been widely used for biometric recognition due to its resistance to theft and forgery. However, with the emergence of adversarial attacks, most existing palm-vein recognition methods are vulnerable to adversarial image attacks, and to the best of our knowledge, there is still no study specifically focusing on palm-vein image attacks. In this paper, we propose an adversarial palm-vein image attack network that generates highly similar adversarial palm-vein images to the original samples, but with altered palm-identities. Unlike most existing generator-oriented methods that directly learn image features via concatenated convolutional layers, our proposed network first maps palm-vein images into multi-scale high-dimensional shallow representation, and then develops attention-based dual-path feature learning modules to extensively exploit diverse palm-vein-specific features. After that, we design visual-consistency and identity-aware loss functions to specially decouple the visual and identity features to reconstruct the adversarial palm-vein images. By doing this, the visual characteristics of palm-vein images can be largely preserved while the identity information is removed in the adversarial palm-vein images, such that high-aggressive adversarial palm-vein samples can be obtained. Extensive white-box and black-box attack experiments conducted on three widely used databases clearly show the effectiveness of the proposed network.