Is It Really You? Exploring Biometric Verification Scenarios in Photorealistic Talking-Head Avatar Videos

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pedrouzo-Rodriguez, Laura, Delgado-DeRobles, Pedro, Gomez, Luis F., Tolosana, Ruben, Vera-Rodriguez, Ruben, Morales, Aythami, Fierrez, Julian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916047999729664
author Pedrouzo-Rodriguez, Laura
Delgado-DeRobles, Pedro
Gomez, Luis F.
Tolosana, Ruben
Vera-Rodriguez, Ruben
Morales, Aythami
Fierrez, Julian
author_facet Pedrouzo-Rodriguez, Laura
Delgado-DeRobles, Pedro
Gomez, Luis F.
Tolosana, Ruben
Vera-Rodriguez, Ruben
Morales, Aythami
Fierrez, Julian
contents Photorealistic talking-head avatars are becoming increasingly common in virtual meetings, gaming, and social platforms. These avatars allow for more immersive communication, but they also introduce serious security risks. One emerging threat is impersonation: an attacker can steal a user's avatar, preserving his appearance and voice, making it nearly impossible to detect its fraudulent usage by sight or sound alone. In this paper, we explore the challenge of biometric verification in such avatar-mediated scenarios. Our main question is whether an individual's facial motion patterns can serve as reliable behavioral biometrics to verify their identity when the avatar's visual appearance is a facsimile of its owner. To answer this question, we introduce a new dataset of realistic avatar videos created using a state-of-the-art one-shot avatar generation model, GAGAvatar, with genuine and impostor avatar videos. We also propose a lightweight, explainable spatio-temporal Graph Convolutional Network architecture with temporal attention pooling, that uses only facial landmarks to model dynamic facial gestures. Experimental results demonstrate that facial motion cues enable meaningful identity verification with AUC values approaching 80%. The proposed benchmark and biometric system are available for the research community in order to bring attention to the urgent need for more advanced behavioral biometric defenses in avatar-based communication systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_00748
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is It Really You? Exploring Biometric Verification Scenarios in Photorealistic Talking-Head Avatar Videos
Pedrouzo-Rodriguez, Laura
Delgado-DeRobles, Pedro
Gomez, Luis F.
Tolosana, Ruben
Vera-Rodriguez, Ruben
Morales, Aythami
Fierrez, Julian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Multimedia
Photorealistic talking-head avatars are becoming increasingly common in virtual meetings, gaming, and social platforms. These avatars allow for more immersive communication, but they also introduce serious security risks. One emerging threat is impersonation: an attacker can steal a user's avatar, preserving his appearance and voice, making it nearly impossible to detect its fraudulent usage by sight or sound alone. In this paper, we explore the challenge of biometric verification in such avatar-mediated scenarios. Our main question is whether an individual's facial motion patterns can serve as reliable behavioral biometrics to verify their identity when the avatar's visual appearance is a facsimile of its owner. To answer this question, we introduce a new dataset of realistic avatar videos created using a state-of-the-art one-shot avatar generation model, GAGAvatar, with genuine and impostor avatar videos. We also propose a lightweight, explainable spatio-temporal Graph Convolutional Network architecture with temporal attention pooling, that uses only facial landmarks to model dynamic facial gestures. Experimental results demonstrate that facial motion cues enable meaningful identity verification with AUC values approaching 80%. The proposed benchmark and biometric system are available for the research community in order to bring attention to the urgent need for more advanced behavioral biometric defenses in avatar-based communication systems.
title Is It Really You? Exploring Biometric Verification Scenarios in Photorealistic Talking-Head Avatar Videos
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00748