Liveness Detection and Automatic Template Updating Using Fusion of ECG and Fingerprint

Fingerprints have been extensively used for biometric recognition around the world. However, fingerprints are not secrets, and an adversary can synthesis a fake finger to spoof the biometric system. The mainstream of the current fingerprint spoof detection methods are basically binary classifier trained on some real and fake samples. While they perform well on detecting fake samples created by using the same methods used for training, their performance degrades when encountering fake samples created by a novel spoofing method. In this paper, we approach the problem from a different perspective by incorporating electrocardiogram (ECG). Compared with the conventional biometrics, stealing someone’s ECG is far more difficult if not impossible. Considering that ECG is a vital signal and motivated by its inherent liveness, we propose to combine it with a fingerprint liveness detection algorithm. The combination is natural as both ECG and fingerprints can be captured from fingertips. In the proposed framework, the ECG and fingerprint are combined not only for authentication purpose but also for liveness detection. We also examine automatic template updating using ECG and fingerprint. In addition, we propose a stopping criterion that reduces the average waiting time for signal acquisition. We have performed extensive experiments on the LivDet2015 database which is presently the latest available liveness detection database and compare the proposed method with six liveness detection methods as well as 12 participants of LivDet2015 competition. The proposed system has achieved a liveness detection equal error rate (EER) of 4.2% incorporating only 5 s of ECG. By extending the recording time to 30 s, liveness detection EER reduces to 2.6% which is about 4 times better than the best of six comparison methods. This is also about 2 times better than the best results achieved by the participants of the LivDet2015 competition.