Biometric Presentation Attack Detection: Beyond the Visible Spectrum

The increased need for unattended authentication in multiple scenarios has motivated a wide deployment of biometric systems in the last few years. This has in turn led to the disclosure of security concerns specifically related to biometric systems. Among them, Presentation Attacks (PAs, i.e., attempts to log into the system with a fake biometric characteristic or presentation attack instrument) pose a severe threat to the security of the system: any person could eventually fabricate or order a gummy finger or face mask to impersonate someone else. The biometrics community has thus made a considerable effort to the development of automatic Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) mechanisms, for instance through the international LivDet competitions. In this context, we present a novel fingerprint PAD scheme based on i) a new capture device able to acquire images within the short wave infrared (SWIR) spectrum, and ii) an in-depth analysis of several state-of-the-art techniques based on both handcrafted and deep learning features. The approach is evaluated on a database comprising over 4700 samples, stemming from 562 different subjects and 35 different presentation attack instrument (PAI) species. The results show the soundness of the proposed approach with a detection equal error rate (D-EER) as low as 1.36% even in a realistic scenario where five different PAI species are considered only for testing purposes (i.e., unknown attacks).