Spotlight: Face Morphs - A New Pathway to Identity Fraud

The human face recognition system is able to recognize new and highly varied instances of people we are familiar with. Unfamiliar face recognition, however, has been shown to be a difficult task and one that is highly prone to error. [1] Despite this, agencies rely on unfamiliar face recognition in areas that are critical to our security. [2] For example, border control can rely on our officials’ ability to decide whether an unfamiliar traveler’s face matches their passport photo. Getting this decision wrong allows individuals with fraudulent passports to illegally enter the country. In short, the poor recognition of unfamiliar faces is a concern for the United States as it can lead to errors in person identification and identity fraud.