ProjAttacker: A Configurable Physical Adversarial Attack for Face Recognition via Projector

Yuanwei Liu, Hui Wei, Chengyu Jia, Ruqi Xiao, Weijian Ruan, Xingxing Wei, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Zheng Wang; Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025, pp. 21248-21257

Previous physical adversarial attacks have shown that carefully crafted perturbations can deceive face recognition systems, revealing critical security vulnerabilities. However, these attacks often struggle to impersonate multiple targets and frequently fail to bypass liveness detection. For example, attacks using human-skin masks are challenging to fabricate, inconvenient to swap between users, and often fail liveness detection due to facial occlusions. A projector, however, can generate content-rich light without obstructing the face, making it ideal for non-intrusive attacks. Thus, we propose a novel physical adversarial attack using a projector and explore the superposition of projected and natural light to create adversarial facial images. This approach eliminates the need for physical artifacts on the face, effectively overcoming these limitations. Specifically, our proposed ProjAttacker generates adversarial 3D textures that are projected onto human faces. To ensure physical realizability, we introduce a light reflection function that models complex optical interactions between projected light and human skin, accounting for reflection and diffraction effects. Furthermore, we incorporate camera Image Signal Processing (ISP) simulation to maintain the robustness of adversarial perturbations across real-world diverse imaging conditions. Comprehensive evaluations conducted in both digital and physical scenarios validate the effectiveness of our method.