FaceCat: Enhancing Face Recognition Security with a Unified Diffusion Model

Abstract

Face anti-spoofing (FAS) and adversarial detection (FAD) have been regarded as critical technologies to ensure the safety of face recognition systems. However, due to limited practicality, complex deployment, and the additional computational overhead, it is necessary to implement both detection techniques within a unified framework. This paper aims to achieve this goal by breaking through two primary obstacles: 1) the suboptimal face feature representation and 2) the scarcity of training data. To address the limited performance caused by existing feature representations, motivated by the rich structural and detailed features of face diffusion models, we propose FaceCat, the first approach leveraging the diffusion model to simultaneously enhance the performance of FAS and FAD. Specifically, FaceCat elaborately designs a hierarchical fusion mechanism to capture rich face semantic features of the diffusion model. These features then serve as a robust foundation for a lightweight head, designed to execute FAS and FAD simultaneously. Due to the limitations in feature representation that arise from relying solely on single-modality image data, we further propose a novel text-guided multi-modal alignment strategy that utilizes text prompts to enrich feature representation, thereby enhancing performance. To combat data scarcity, we build a comprehensive dataset with a wide range of 28 attack types, offering greater potential for a unified framework in facial security. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of FaceCat generalizes significantly better and obtains excellent robustness against common input transformations.