document security teams

Abstract: Face morphing attacks, in which the biometric traits of two or more identities are blended into a single face image, pose a severe threat to identity document issuance and automated border control. Consequently, a large body of work has proposed Single-image Morphing Attack Detection (S-MAD) algorithms and benchmarked them on datasets such as SYN-MAD22. However, the majority of these benchmarks operate exclusively in the digital domain, which contrasts with the real-world passport issuance pipeline in some countries, which still requires an applicant-supplied photograph to be printed and subsequently re-scanned before it is embedded in the identity document or fed into an automated verification system. This print-scan step introduces halftoning, resampling, color-space, and sensor noise that are absent from digital pipelines, and may mask the high-frequency artifacts that S-MAD models rely on. In this work, we introduce a print-scan version of the SYN-MAD22 dataset, obtained by printing and re-scanning all bona fide and morphed images at 300 and 600 DPI, and we use it to evaluate eight state-of-the-art S-MAD models trained exclusively on digital data. We additionally repeat the acquisition with a second scanner to assess cross-device robustness. Our results show that detectors that achieve near state-of-the-art performance in the digital domain suffer a more than threefold increase in average equal error rate, with the same qualitative degradation observed across both scanning devices, exposing a critical, previously under-reported gap between digital-benchmark performance and robustness to print-scan degradation.

Abstract: Tampered Text Detection (TTD) is essential for safeguarding document authenticity in security-critical workflows. Existing expert models are effective at capturing subtle manipulation traces but often generalize poorly across diverse document domains, while Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer stronger semantic understanding and transferability yet remain insensitive to fine-grained forensic artifacts. This complementarity motivates us to investigate how expert forensic perception can be internalized into an MLLM rather than merely accessed through an external module. We identify a fundamental Double Mismatch that hinders this goal: a Spatial Precision Mismatch between coarse visual tokens and tiny tampered regions, and a Perceptual Granularity Mismatch between semantics-oriented pre-training and low-level forensic perception. To address these challenges, we propose Expert Knowledge Internalization (EKI), a progressive two-stage framework that transfers forensic expertise into the MLLM itself. In Stage 1, Text-Focused and Image-Focused strategies establish precise spatial focus on small text regions. In Stage 2, the proposed Forensic-General Representation Alignment (FGRA) loss aligns shallow LLM representations with those of a pre-trained forensic expert, enabling the model to acquire fine-grained artifact perception before such cues are diluted by deeper semantic abstraction. Extensive experiments on multiple in-domain and cross-domain benchmarks demonstrate that EKI achieves state-of-the-art performance and stronger generalization than existing expert-model-based and MLLM-based methods. Moreover, the expert is required only during training, allowing the resulting MLLM to maintain inference efficiency nearly identical to the vanilla model without relying on any external expert at inference.