New approach for liveness detection in fingerprint scanners based on valley noise analysis

Recently, research has shown that it is possible to spoof a variety of fingerprint scanners using some simple techniques with molds made from plastic, clay, Play-Doh, silicone or gelatin materials. To protect against spoofing, methods of liveness detection measure physiological signs of life from fingerprints ensuring only live fingers are captured for enrollment or authentication. In this paper, a new liveness detection method is proposed which is based on noise analysis along the valleys in the ridge-valley structure of fingerprint images. Unlike live fingers which have a clear ridge-valley structure, artificial fingers have a distinct noise distribution due to the material’s properties when placed on a fingerprint scanner. Statistical features are extracted in multiresolution scales using wavelet decomposition technique. Based on these features, liveness separation (live/non-live) is performed using classification trees and neural networks. We test this method on the dataset which contains about 58 live, 80 spoof (50 made from Play-Doh and 30 made from gelatin), and 25 cadaver subjects for 3 different scanners. Also, we test this method on a second dataset which contains 28 live and 28 spoof (made from silicone) subjects. Results show that we can get approximately 90.9-100% classification of spoof and live fingerprints. The proposed liveness detection method is purely software based and application of this method can provide anti-spoofing protection for fingerprint scanners.