Liveness Detection in Biometrics

The use of biometrics as an alternative for PIN and password-based authentication systems becomes increasingly attractive in this day and age. Biometric systems perform an authentication by personal biological or behavioral characteristics. A negative side effect of the increasing use of biometric systems is the progressing development of sophisticated attacks, in particular presentation attacks. Liveness detection has the aim to identify a living and during the biometric authentication process present individual as such and to repel spoofing attacks at the data capture subsystem. In this paper different current attack scenarios are described. Based on these scenarios, several liveness detection techniques are elaborated and investigated as possible countermeasures.