Towards Effective Adversarial Textured 3D Meshes on Physical Face Recognition

X. Yang, Chang Liu, Longlong Xu, Yikai Wang, Yinpeng Dong +3 more
2/14/2026

No official code found. Best implementation: thu-ml/AT3D (45 stars, MIT, last commit 2023-08-12).

Abstract

Face recognition is a prevailing authentication solution in numerous biometric applications. Physical adversarial attacks, as an important surrogate, can identify the weak-nesses of face recognition systems and evaluate their ro-bustness before deployed. However, most existing physical attacks are either detectable readily or ineffective against commercial recognition systems. The goal of this work is to develop a more reliable technique that can carry out an end-to-end evaluation of adversarial robustness for commercial systems. It requires that this technique can simultaneously deceive black-box recognition models and evade defensive mechanisms. To fulfill this, we design adversarial textured 3D meshes (AT3D) with an elaborate topology on a human face, which can be 3D-printed and pasted on the attacker's face to evade the defenses. However, the mesh-based op-timization regime calculates gradients in high-dimensional mesh space, and can be trapped into local optima with un-satisfactory transferability. To deviate from the mesh-based space, we propose to perturb the low-dimensional coefficient space based on 3D Morphable Model, which signifi-cantly improves black-box transferability meanwhile enjoying faster search efficiency and better visual quality. Exten-sive experiments in digital and physical scenarios show that our method effectively explores the security vulnerabilities of multiple popular commercial services, including three recognition A PIs, four anti-spoofing A PIs, two prevailing mobile phones and two automated access control systems.

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Code Implementations(1)

thu-ml/AT3DCommunity100%
MIT

Towards Effective Adversarial Textured 3D Meshes on Physical Face Recognition, CVPR 2023, Highlight

454Shell, PythonMar 23, 20233 years agoMIT

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Cite this paper

@article{yang2026towards,
  title  = {Towards Effective Adversarial Textured 3D Meshes on Physical Face Recognition},
  author = {X. Yang and Chang Liu and Longlong Xu and Yikai Wang and Yinpeng Dong and Ning Chen and Hang Su and Jun Zhu},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2303.15818},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.15818},
  journal = {CVPR 2023 2023}
}

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