Low-Cost and Efficient Hardware Solution for Presentation Attack Detection in Fingerprint Biometrics Using Special Lighting Microscopes

Biometric recognition is already a big player in how we interact with our phones and access control systems. This is a result of its comfort of use, speed, and security. For the case of border control, it eases the task of person identification and black-list checking. Although the performance rates for verification and identification have dropped in the last decades, protection against vulnerabilities is still under heavy development. This paper will focus on the detection of presentation attacks in fingerprint biometrics, i.e., attacks that are performed at the sensor level, and from a hardware perspective. Most research on presentation attacks has been carried out on software techniques due to its lower price as, in general, hardware solutions require additional subsystems. For this paper, two low-cost handheld microscopes with special lighting conditions were used to capture real and fake fingerprints, obtaining a total of 7704 images from 17 subjects. After several analyses of wavelengths and classification, it was concluded that only one of the wavelengths is already enough to obtain a very low error rate compared with other solutions: an attack presentation classification error rate of 1.78% and a bona fide presentation classification error rate (BPCER) of 1.33%, even including non-conformant fingerprints in the database. On a specific wavelength, a BPCER of 0% was achieved (having 1926 samples). Thus, the solution can be low cost and efficient. The evaluation and reporting were done following ISO/IEC 30107-3.