Computer Vision News - April 2018

Fingerprint authentication systems are highly vulnerable to artificial reproductions of fingerprint made up of materials such as silicon, gelatin or latex, also called fake fingerprints (see images below). Submitting such a replica is often named to perform a presentation attack. To counteract these possibility, fingerprint liveness detection is a discipline aimed to design pattern recognition-based algorithms for distinguishing between live and fake fingerprints . Detecting presentation attacks is not trivial because we have an arms-race problem, where we potentially are unaware about the materials and methods adopted to attack the system. The PRA Lab’s Biometric Unit of the University of Cagliari gained a great experience over time on this problem (Fig. 2) with more than 30 papers in 10 work years and the participation to some EU projects like Tabula Rasa . In order to cover the lack of common data and protocols to assess the performance of fingerprint liveness detection systems, the Biometric Unit organized the International Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet) since from 2009, in cooperation with Clarkson University until the 5th edition in 2015. The goal of the LivDet competitions is to assess the performance of fingerprint liveness detection algorithms by using common experimental protocol and data sets. Competition is open to academic and industrial institutions having developed fingerprint liveness detection algorithms. Each edition is characterized by a different set of challenges against which the contending teams compete. The 2017 edition was carried out in and organized by the PRA Lab’s Biometric Unit staff under the guidance of Gian Luca Marcialis . Seventeen competitors participated in this last edition. 22 Challenge: LivDet Challenge Every month, Computer Vision News reviews a challenge related to our field. If you do not take part in challenges, but are interested to know the new methods proposed by the scientific community to solve them, this section is for you. This month Gian Luca Marcialis tells you about the LivDet challenge, of which he organized the 2017 edition. Results were presented at the International Conference on Biometrics ( ICB 2018 ) and are publicly available on the LivDet web site . International Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition Computer Vision News by Gian Luca Marcialis