Liveness Detection for Face Recognition

Biometrics is an emerging technology that enables uniquely recognizing humans based upon one or more intrinsic physiological or behavioral characteristics, such as faces, fingerprints, irises, voices (Ross et al., 2006). However, spoofing attack (or copy attack) is still a fatal threat for biometric authentication systems (Schukers, 2002). Liveness detection, which aims at recognition of human physiological activities as the liveness indicator to prevent spoofing attack, is becoming a very active topic in field of fingerprint recognition and iris recognition (Schuckers, 2002; Bigun et al., 2004; Parthasaradhi et al., 2005; Antonelli et al., 2006). In face recognition community, although numerous recognition approaches have been presented, the effort on anti-spoofing is still very limited (Zhao et al., 2003). The most common faking way is to use a facial photograph of a valid user to spoof face recognition systems. Nowadays, video of a valid user can also be easily captured by needle camera for spoofing. Therefore anti-spoof problem should be well solved before face recognition could be widely applied in our life. Most of the current face recognition works with excellent performance, are based on intensity images and equipped with a generic camera. Thus, an anti-spoofing method without additional device will be preferable, since it could be easily integrated into the existing face recognition systems. In Section 2, we give a brief review of spoofing ways in face recognition and some related work. The potential clues will be also presented and commented. In Section 3, a real-time liveness detection approach is presented against photograph spoofing in a non-intrusive manner for face recognition, which does not require any additional hardware except for a generic webcamera. In Section 4, databases are introduced for eyeblink-based anti-spoofing. Section 5 presents an extensive set of experiments to show effectiveness of our approach. Discussions are in Section 6.