LivDet in Action - Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition 2019

The International Fingerprint liveness Detection Competition (LivDet) is an open and well-acknowledged meeting point of academies and private companies that deal with the problem of distinguishing images coming from reproductions of fingerprints made of artificial materials and images relative to real fingerprints. In this edition of LivDet we invited the competitors to propose integrated algorithms with matching systems. The goal was to investigate at which extent this integration impact on the whole performance. Twelve algorithms were submitted to the competition, eight of which worked on integrated systems.Comment: Preprint version of a paper accepted at ICB 201

Using biometrics authentication via fingerprint recognition in e-Exams in e-Learning environment

E-learning is a great opportunity for modern life. Notably, however, the tool needs to be coupled with efficient and reliable security mechanisms to ensure the medium can be established as a dependable one. Authentication of e-exam takers is of prime importance so that exams are given by fair means. A new approach shall be proposed so as to ensure that no unauthorised individuals are permitted to give the exams

Novel active sweat pores based liveness detection techniques for fingerprint biometrics

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Liveness detection in automatic fingerprint identification systems (AFIS) is an issue which still prevents its use in many unsupervised security applications. In the last decade, various hardware and software solutions for the detection of liveness from fingerprints have been proposed by academic research groups. However, the proposed methods have not yet been practically implemented with existing AFIS. A large amount of research is needed before commercial AFIS can be implemented. In this research, novel active pore based liveness detection methods were proposed for AFIS. These novel methods are based on the detection of active pores on fingertip ridges, and the measurement of ionic activity in the sweat fluid that appears at the openings of active pores. The literature is critically reviewed in terms of liveness detection issues. Existing fingerprint technology, and hardware and software solutions proposed for liveness detection are also examined. A comparative study has been completed on the commercially and specifically collected fingerprint databases, and it was concluded that images in these datasets do not contained any visible evidence of liveness. They were used to test various algorithms developed for liveness detection; however, to implement proper liveness detection in fingerprint systems a new database with fine details of fingertips is needed. Therefore a new high resolution Brunel Fingerprint Biometric Database (B-FBDB) was captured and collected for this novel liveness detection research. The first proposed novel liveness detection method is a High Pass Correlation Filtering Algorithm (HCFA). This image processing algorithm has been developed in Matlab and tested on B-FBDB dataset images. The results of the HCFA algorithm have proved the idea behind the research, as they successfully demonstrated the clear possibility of liveness detection by active pore detection from high resolution images. The second novel liveness detection method is based on the experimental evidence. This method explains liveness detection by measuring the ionic activities above the sample of ionic sweat fluid. A Micro Needle Electrode (MNE) based setup was used in this experiment to measure the ionic activities. In results, 5.9 pC to 6.5 pC charges were detected with ten NME positions (50μm to 360 μm) above the surface of ionic sweat fluid. These measurements are also a proof of liveness from active fingertip pores, and this technique can be used in the future to implement liveness detection solutions. The interaction of NME and ionic fluid was modelled in COMSOL multiphysics, and the effect of electric field variations on NME was recorded at 5μm -360μm positions above the ionic fluid.This study is funded by the University of Sindh, Jamshoro, Pakistan and the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan

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. In this context, we present a novel fingerprint presentation attack detection (PAD) scheme based on i) a new capture device able to acquire images within the short wave infrared (SWIR) spectrum, and i i) an in-depth analysis of several state-of-theart 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 1.35% even in a realistic scenario where five different PAI species are considered only for testing purposes (i.e., unknown attacks

A PUF-and biometric-based lightweight hardware solution to increase security at sensor nodes

Security is essential in sensor nodes which acquire and transmit sensitive data. However, the constraints of processing, memory and power consumption are very high in these nodes. Cryptographic algorithms based on symmetric key are very suitable for them. The drawback is that secure storage of secret keys is required. In this work, a low-cost solution is presented to obfuscate secret keys with Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), which exploit the hardware identity of the node. In addition, a lightweight fingerprint recognition solution is proposed, which can be implemented in low-cost sensor nodes. Since biometric data of individuals are sensitive, they are also obfuscated with PUFs. Both solutions allow authenticating the origin of the sensed data with a proposed dual-factor authentication protocol. One factor is the unique physical identity of the trusted sensor node that measures them. The other factor is the physical presence of the legitimate individual in charge of authorizing their transmission. Experimental results are included to prove how the proposed PUF-based solution can be implemented with the SRAMs of commercial Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) chips which belong to the communication module of the sensor node. Implementation results show how the proposed fingerprint recognition based on the novel texture-based feature named QFingerMap16 (QFM) can be implemented fully inside a low-cost sensor node. Robustness, security and privacy issues at the proposed sensor nodes are discussed and analyzed with experimental results from PUFs and fingerprints taken from public and standard databases.Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad TEC2014-57971-R, TEC2017-83557-

Textural features for fingerprint liveness detection

The main topic ofmy research during these three years concerned biometrics and in particular the Fingerprint Liveness Detection (FLD), namely the recognition of fake fingerprints. Fingerprints spoofing is a topical issue as evidenced by the release of the latest iPhone and Samsung Galaxy models with an embedded fingerprint reader as an alternative to passwords. Several videos posted on YouTube show how to violate these devices by using fake fingerprints which demonstrated how the problemof vulnerability to spoofing constitutes a threat to the existing fingerprint recognition systems. Despite the fact that many algorithms have been proposed so far, none of them showed the ability to clearly discriminate between real and fake fingertips. In my work, after a study of the state-of-the-art I paid a special attention on the so called textural algorithms. I first used the LBP (Local Binary Pattern) algorithm and then I worked on the introduction of the LPQ (Local Phase Quantization) and the BSIF (Binarized Statistical Image Features) algorithms in the FLD field. In the last two years I worked especially on what we called the “user specific” problem. In the extracted features we noticed the presence of characteristic related not only to the liveness but also to the different users. We have been able to improve the obtained results identifying and removing, at least partially, this user specific characteristic. Since 2009 the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering of the University of Cagliari and theDepartment of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the ClarksonUniversity have organized the Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet). I have been involved in the organization of both second and third editions of the Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet 2011 and LivDet 2013) and I am currently involved in the acquisition of live and fake fingerprint that will be inserted in three of the LivDet 2015 datasets