On the Robustness of Fingerprint Liveness Detection Algorithms against New Materials used for Spoofing

Fingerprint biometric systems may be deceived by attacks at sensor level that use fake fingers. A secure fingerprint scanner is required to possess the ability to determine if the image comes from a living individual or not. Recently, several liveness detection approaches have been proposed to address this problem. At present performances of the existing software-based solutions have been assessed with different sensors and using small data sets. Moreover, it is assumed that fake fingerprints are produced by adopting the same materials used for training the system. This paper looks at the cases where the test spoof finger is made by employing a material new for the fingerprint sensor. We propose an experimental comparison among the current fingerprint liveness detection approaches accomplished by adopting materials for training different than those used for testing. Experiments have been performed by using standard databases taken from the LivDet09 Competition.