Face Liveness Detection Based on Skin Blood Flow Analysis

Improving Monocular Facial Presentation-Attack-Detection Robustness with Synthetic Noise Augmentations

We present a synthetic augmentation approach towards improving monocular face presentation-attack-detection (PAD) robustness to real-world noise additions. Face PAD algorithms secure authentication systems against spoofing attacks, such as pictures, videos, and 2D-inspired masks. Best-in-class PAD methods typically use 3D imagery, but these can be expensive. To reduce application cost, there is a growing field investigating monocular algorithms that detect facial artifacts. These approaches work well in laboratory conditions, but can be sensitive to the imaging environment (e.g., sensor noise, dynamic lighting, etc.). The ideal solution for noise robustness is training under all expected conditions; however, this is time consuming and expensive. Instead, we propose that physics-informed noise-augmentations can pragmatically achieve robustness. Our toolbox contains twelve sensor and lighting effect generators. We demonstrate that our toolbox generates more robust PAD features than popular augmentation methods in noisy test-evaluations. We also observe that the toolbox improves accuracy on clean test data, suggesting that it inherently helps discern spoof artifacts from imaging artifacts. We validate this hypothesis through an ablation study, where we remove liveliness pairs (e.g., live or spoof imagery only for participants) to identify how much real data can be replaced with synthetic augmentations. We demonstrate that using these noise augmentations allows us to achieve better test accuracy while only requiring 30% of participants to be fully imaged under all conditions. These findings indicate that synthetic noise augmentations are a great way to improve PAD, addressing noise robustness while simplifying data collection.

A survey on face presentation attack detection mechanisms: hitherto and future perspectives

The advances in human face recognition (FR) systems have recorded sublime success for automatic and secured authentication in diverse domains. Although the traditional methods have been overshadowed by face recognition counterpart during this progress, computer vision gains rapid traction, and the modern accomplishments address problems with real-world complexity. However, security threats in FR-based systems are a growing concern that offers a new-fangled track to the research community. In particular, recent past has witnessed ample instances of spoofing attacks where imposter breaches security of the system with an artifact of human face to circumvent the sensor module. Therefore, presentation attack detection (PAD) capabilities are instilled in the system for discriminating genuine and fake traits and anticipation of their impact on the overall behavior of the FR-based systems. To scrutinize exhaustively the current state-of-the-art efforts, provide insights, and identify potential research directions on face PAD mechanisms, this systematic study presents a review of face anti-spoofing techniques that use computational approaches. The study includes advancements in face PAD mechanisms ranging from traditional hardware-based solutions to up-to-date handcrafted features or deep learning-based approaches. We also present an analytical overview of face artifacts, performance protocols, and benchmark face anti-spoofing datasets. In addition, we perform analysis of the twelve recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) face PAD techniques on a common platform using identical dataset (i.e., REPLAY-ATTACK) and performance protocols (i.e., HTER and ACA). Our overall analysis investigates that despite prevalent face PAD mechanisms demonstrate potential performance, there exist some crucial issues that requisite a futuristic attention. Our analysis put forward a number of open issues such as; limited generalization to unknown attacks, inadequacy of face datasets for DL-models, training models with new fakes, efficient DL-enabled face PAD with smaller datasets, and limited discrimination of handcrafted features. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic is an additional challenge to the existing face-based recognition systems, and hence to the PAD methods. Our motive is to present a complete reference of studies in this field and orient researchers to promising directions.

Face presentation attack detection: Research opportunities and perspectives

The rapid development of biometric methods and their implementation in practice has led to the widespread attacks called spoofing, which are purely biometric vulnerabilities, but are not used in conjunction with other IT security solutions. Although biometric recognition as a branch of computer science dates back to the 1960s, attacks on biometric systems have become more sophisticated since the 2010s due to great advances in pattern recognition. It should be noted that face recognition is the most attractive topic for deceiving recognition systems. Popular presentation attacks, such as print, replay and mask attacks, have demonstrated a high security risk for SOTA face recognition systems. Many Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) methods (also known as face anti-spoofing methods or countermeasures) have been proposed that can automatically detect and mitigate such targeted attacks. The article presents a systematic survey in face anti-spoofing with prognostic trends in this research area. A brief description of 16 outstanding previous surveys on the face PAD field is mentioned, from which it is possible to trace how this scientific topic has developed. SOTA in PAD provides an analysis of a wide range of the PAD methods, which are categorized into two unbalanced groups: digital (feature-based) and physical (sensor-based) methods. Generalization of deep learning methods as a recent trend aimed at improving recognition results requires special attention. This survey presents five types of generalization such as transfer learning, anomaly detection, few-shot and zero-shot learning, auxiliary supervision, and multi-spectral methods. A summary of over than 40 existing 2D/3D face spoofing databases is a guideline for those who want to select databases for experiments. One can also find a description of performance evaluation metrics and testing protocols. In addition, we discuss trends and perspectives in the emerging field of facial biometrics.

Boosting Face Presentation Attack Detection in Multi-Spectral Videos Through Score Fusion of Wavelet Partition Images

Presentation attack detection (PAD) algorithms have become an integral requirement for the secure usage of face recognition systems. As face recognition algorithms and applications increase from constrained to unconstrained environments and in multispectral scenarios, presentation attack detection algorithms must also increase their scope and effectiveness. It is important to realize that the PAD algorithms are not only effective for one environment or condition but rather be generalizable to a multitude of variabilities that are presented to a face recognition algorithm. With this motivation, as the first contribution, the article presents a unified PAD algorithm for different kinds of attacks such as printed photos, a replay of video, 3D masks, silicone masks, and wax faces. The proposed algorithm utilizes a combination of wavelet decomposed raw input images from sensor and face region data to detect whether the input image is bonafide or attacked. The second contribution of the article is the collection of a large presentation attack database in the NIR spectrum, containing images from individuals of two ethnicities. The database contains 500 print attack videos which comprise approximately 1,00,000 frames collectively in the NIR spectrum. Extensive evaluation of the algorithm on NIR images as well as visible spectrum images obtained from existing benchmark databases shows that the proposed algorithm yields state-of-the-art results and surpassed several complex and state-of-the-art algorithms. For instance, on benchmark datasets, namely CASIA-FASD, Replay-Attack, and MSU-MFSD, the proposed algorithm achieves a maximum error of 0.92% which is significantly lower than state-of-the-art attack detection algorithms.

An Identity Authentication Method Combining Liveness Detection and Face Recognition

In this study, an advanced Kinect sensor was adopted to acquire infrared radiation (IR) images for liveness detection. The proposed liveness detection method based on infrared radiation (IR) images can deal with face spoofs. Face pictures were acquired by a Kinect camera and converted into IR images. Feature extraction and classification were carried out by a deep neural network to distinguish between real individuals and face spoofs. IR images collected by the Kinect camera have depth information. Therefore, the IR pixels from live images have an evident hierarchical structure, while those from photos or videos have no evident hierarchical feature. Accordingly, two types of IR images were learned through the deep network to realize the identification of whether images were from live individuals. In comparison with other liveness detection cross-databases, our recognition accuracy was 99.8% and better than other algorithms. FaceNet is a face recognition model, and it is robust to occlusion, blur, illumination, and steering. We combined the liveness detection and FaceNet model for identity authentication. For improving the application of the authentication approach, we proposed two improved ways to run the FaceNet model. Experimental results showed that the combination of the proposed liveness detection and improved face recognition had a good recognition effect and can be used for identity authentication.

Editorial of Special Issue “Information Technology and Its Applications”

This book contains the successful invited submissions [...]

Comparison of Random Subspace and Voting Ensemble Machine Learning Methods for Face Recognition

Biometry based authentication and recognition have attracted greater attention due to numerous applications for security-conscious societies, since biometrics brings accurate and consistent identification. Face biometry possesses the merits of low intrusiveness and high precision. Despite the presence of several biometric methods, like iris scan, fingerprints, and hand geometry, the most effective and broadly utilized method is face recognition, because it is reasonable, natural, and non-intrusive. Face recognition is a part of the pattern recognition that is applied for identifying or authenticating a person that is extracted from a digital image or a video automatically. Moreover, current innovations in big data analysis, cloud computing, social networks, and machine learning have allowed for a straightforward understanding of how different challenging issues in face recognition might be solved. Effective face recognition in the enormous data concept is a crucial and challenging task. This study develops an intelligent face recognition framework that recognizes faces through efficient ensemble learning techniques, which are Random Subspace and Voting, in order to improve the performance of biometric systems. Furthermore, several methods including skin color detection, histogram feature extraction, and ensemble learner-based face recognition are presented. The proposed framework, which has a symmetric structure, is found to have high potential for biometrics. Hence, the proposed framework utilizing histogram feature extraction with Random Subspace and Voting ensemble learners have presented their superiority over two different databases as compared with state-of-art face recognition. This proposed method has reached an accuracy of 99.25% with random forest, combined with both ensemble learners on the FERET face database.