Luca Ghiani

LivDet 2011 — Fingerprint liveness detection competition 2011

“Liveness detection”, a technique used to determine the vitality of a submitted biometric, has been implemented in fingerprint scanners in recent years. The goal for the LivDet 2011 competition is to compare software-based fingerprint liveness detection methodologies (Part 1), as well as fingerprint systems which incorporate liveness detection capabilities (Part 2), using a standardized testing protocol and large quantities of spoof and live fingerprint images. This competition was open to all academic and industrial institutions which have a solution for either software-based or system-based fingerprint vitality detection problem. Five submissions across the two parts of the competition resulted in successful completion. These submissions were: Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Automation (CASIA), Federico II University (Federico) and Dermalog Identification SystemsGmbH (Dermalog) for Part 1: Algorithms, and GreenBit and Dermalog for Part 2: Systems. Part 1 was evaluated using four different datasets. The best results were from Federico on the Digital Persona dataset with error for live and spoof detection of 6.2% and 11.61% respectively. The best overall results for Part 1 were Dermalog with 34.05 FerrFake and 11.825% FerrLive. Part 2 was evaluated using live subjects and spoof finger casts. The best results were from Dermalog with an error for live and spoof of 42.5% and 0.8%, respectively.

Fingerprint Liveness Detection using Binarized Statistical Image Features

Recent experiments, reported in the third edition of Fingerprint Liveness Detection competition (LivDet 2013), have clearly shown that fingerprint liveness detection is a very difficult and challenging task. Although the number of approaches is large, none of them can be claimed as able to detect liveness of fingerprint traits with an acceptable error rate. In our opinion, in order to investigate at which extent this error can be reduced, novel feature sets must be proposed, and, eventually, integrated with existing ones. In this paper, a novel fingerprint liveness descriptor named “BSIF” is described, which, similarly to Local Binary Pattern and Local Phase Quantization-based representations, encodes the local fingerprint texture on a feature vector. Experimental results on LivDet 2011 data sets appear to be encouraging and make this descriptor worth of further investigations.

LivDet 2013 Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition 2013

A spoof or fake is a counterfeit biometric that is used in an attempt to circumvent a biometric sensor Liveness detection distinguishes between live and fake biometric traits. Liveness detection is based on the principle that additional information can be garnered above and beyond the data procured by a standard verification system, and this additional data can be used to verify if a biometric measure is authentic. The Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet) goal is to compare both software-based (Part 1) and hardware-based (Part 2) fingerprint liveness detection methodologies and is open to all academic and industrial institutions. Submissions for the third edition were much more than in the previous editions of LivDet demonstrating a growing interest in the area. We had nine participants (with eleven algorithms) for Part 1 and two submissions for Part 2.

Experimental results on the feature-level fusion of multiple fingerprint liveness detection algorithms

The aim of fingerprint liveness detection is to detect if a fingerprint image, sensed by an electronic device, belongs to an alive fingertip or to an artificial replica of it. It is well-known that a fingerprint can be replicated and standard electronic sensors cannot distinguish between a replica and an alive fingerprint image. Accordingly, several countermeasures in terms of fingerprint liveness detection algorithms have been proposed, but their performance is not yet acceptable. However, no works studied the possibility of combining different feature sets, thus exploiting the eventual complementarity among them. In this paper, we show some preliminary experiments on feature-level fusion of several algorithms, including a novel feature set proposed by the authors. Experiments are carried out on the datasets available at Second International Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet 2011). Reported results clearly show that multiple feature sets allow improving the liveness detection performance.

Review of the Fingerprint Liveness Detection (LivDet) competition series: 2009 to 2015

Abstract A spoof attack, a subset of presentation attacks, is the use of an artificial replica of a biometric in an attempt to circumvent a biometric sensor. Liveness detection, or presentation attack detection, distinguishes between live and fake biometric traits and is based on the principle that additional information can be garnered above and beyond the data procured by a standard authentication system to determine if a biometric measure is authentic. The goals for the Liveness Detection (LivDet) competitions are to compare software-based fingerprint liveness detection and artifact detection algorithms (Part 1), as well as fingerprint systems which incorporate liveness detection or artifact detection capabilities (Part 2), using a standardized testing protocol and large quantities of spoof and live tests. The competitions are open to all academic and industrial institutions which have a solution for either software-based or system-based fingerprint liveness detection. The LivDet competitions have been hosted in 2009, 2011, 2013 and 2015 and have shown themselves to provide a crucial look at the current state of the art in liveness detection schemes. There has been a noticeable increase in the number of participants in LivDet competitions as well as a noticeable decrease in error rates across competitions. Participants have grown from four to the most recent thirteen submissions for Fingerprint Part 1. Fingerprints Part 2 has held steady at two submissions each competition in 2011 and 2013 and only one for the 2015 edition. The continuous increase of competitors demonstrates a growing interest in the topic.

LivDet 2015 fingerprint liveness detection competition 2015

A spoof or fake is a counterfeit biometric that is used in an attempt to circumvent a biometric sensor. Liveness detection distinguishes between live and fake biometric traits. Liveness detection is based on the principle that additional information can be garnered above and beyond the data procured by a standard authentication system, and this additional data can be used to determine if a biometric measure is authentic. The Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet) goal is to compare both software-based and hardware-based fingerprint liveness detection methodologies. The competition is open to all academic and industrial institutions. The number of competitors grows at every LivDet edition demonstrating a growing interest in the area. In this edition eleven institutions have registered with twelve submissions for the software-based part and one for the hardware-based part.

Fingerprint liveness detection using local texture features

The problem of fingerprint liveness detection has received an increasing attention in the last decade, as attested by the organisation of three editions of an international competition, named LivDet, dedicated to this challenge. LivDet editions and other works in the literature showed that the performance of current fingerprint liveness detection algorithms is not good enough to allow empowering a fingerprint verification system with a module aimed to distinguish alive from fake fingerprint images. However, recent developments have shown that texture-based features can provide promising solutions to this problem. In this study, a novel fingerprint liveness descriptor named binarised statistical image features (BSIFs) is adopted. Similarly to local binary pattern and local phase quantisation-based representations, BSIF encodes the local fingerprint texture into a feature vector by using a set of filters that, unlike other methods, are learnt from natural images. Extensive experiments with over 40,000 live and fake fingerprint images show that the authors’ proposed method outperforms most of the state-of-the-art algorithms, allowing a step ahead to the real integration of fingerprint liveness detectors into verification systems.

On Combining Edge Detection Methods for Improving BSIF Based Facial Recognition Performances

Lighting variation is a major challenge for an automatic face recognition system. In order to overcome this problem, many methods have been proposed. Most of them try to extract features invariant to illumination changes or to reduce illumination changes in a pre-processing step and to extract features for recognition.

Exploiting the Golden Ratio on Human Faces for Head-Pose Estimation

In this paper, a novel method for automatic head pose estimation is presented. This is based on a geometrical model of the head, in which basic features for estimating the pose consist in eyes and nose coordinates only. Worth noting, the majority of state-of-the-art approaches requires at least five features. The novelty of our work is the exploitation of the Vitruvian man’s proportions and the related “Golden Ratio”. The “Vitruvian man” is the well-known master-work by Leonardo Da Vinci, never used for automatic head pose estimation. Proposed method is compared by experiments with state-of-the-art ones, and shows a competitive performance although its simplicity and its low computational complexity.

User-specific effects in Fingerprint Presentation Attacks Detection: Insights for future research

A fingerprint presentation attacks detector (FPAD) is designed to obtain a certain performance regardless of the targeted user population. However, two recent works on facial traits showed that a PAD system can exploit very useful information from the targeted user population. In this paper, we explored the existence of that kind of information in fingerprints when textural features are adopted. We show by experiments that such features embed not only intrinsic differences of the given fingerprint replica with respect to a generic live fingerprint, but also contains characteristics present in other fingers of the same user, and characteristics extracted directly from spoofs of the targeted fingerprint itself. These interesting evidences could lead to novel developments in the design of future FPADs.