Presentation Attack Detection for Cadaver Iris

This paper presents a deep-learning-based method for iris presentation attack detection (PAD) when iris images are obtained from deceased people. Post-mortem iris recognition, despite being a potentially useful method that could aid forensic identification, can also pose challenges when used inappropriately, i.e. utilizing a dead organ of a person in an unauthorized way. Our approach is based on the VGG-16 architecture fine-tuned with a database of 574 post-mortem, near-infrared iris images from the WarsawBioBase-PostMortem-Iris-v1 database, complemented by a dataset of 256 images of live irises, collected within the scope of this study. Experiments described in this paper show that our approach is able to correctly classify iris images as either representing a live or a dead eye in almost 99% of the trials, averaged over 20 subject-disjoint, train/test splits. We also show that the post-mortem iris detection accuracy increases as time since death elapses, and that we are able to construct a classification system with APCER=0%@BPCER≈1% (Attack Presentation and Bona Fide Presentation Classification Error Rates, respectively) when only post-mortem samples collected at least 16 hours post-mortem are considered. Since acquisitions of ante- and post-mortem samples differ significantly, we applied countermeasures to minimize bias in our classification methodology caused by image properties that are not related to the PAD. This included using the same iris sensor in collection of ante- and post-mortem samples, and analysis of class activation maps to ensure that discriminant iris regions utilized by our classifier are related to properties of the eye, and not to those of the acquisition protocol. This paper offers the first known to us PAD method in a postmortem setting, together with an explanation of the decisions made by the convolutional neural network. Along with the paper we offer source codes, weights of the trained network, and a dataset of live iris images to facilitate reproducibility and further research.