Non-intrusive liveness detection by face images

A technique evaluating liveness in face image sequences is presented. To ensure the actual presence of alive face in contrast to a photograph (playback attack), is a significant problem in face authentication to the extent that anti-spoofing measures are highly desirable. The purpose of the proposed system is to assist in a biometric authentication framework, by adding liveness awareness in a non-intrusive manner. Analyzing the trajectories of certain parts of alive face reveals valuable information to discriminate it against a spoofed one. The proposed system uses a lightweight novel optical flow, which is especially applicable in face motion estimation based on the structure tensor and inputs of a few frames. For reliable face part detection, the system utilizes a model-based local Gabor decomposition and SVM experts, where selected points from a retinotopic grid are used to form regional face models. Also the estimated optical flow is exploited to detect a face part. The whole procedure, starting with three images as input and finishing in a liveness score, is executed in near real-time without special purpose hardware. Experimental results on the proposed system are presented on both a public database and spoofing attack simulations. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.