Liveness Detection for Fingerprint Biometrics

Biometrics refers to automated recognition of individuals based on their biological and behavioral characteristics. Biometric systems are widely used for security. They are used in forensic and commercial applications. Among all biometric techniques, fingerprint recognition is the most widely used for personal identification systems due to its permanence and uniqueness. But biometric systems are vulnerable to certain type of attacks. Spoofing refers to the fraudulent action by an unauthorized person into biometric systems using fake input that reproduces one of the authorized person’s biometric input. Liveness detection provides extra level of authentication to biometrics. It is used to prevent forgeries. The fingerprint Liveness detection is performed by measuring the following quality features of fingerprint. They are Spatial Coherence, Gabor Features, Ridge frequency. This approach is based on fingerprint image quality. This technique is software based as it requires no external hardware. This approach is inexpensive.