Feature Fusion for Fingerprint Liveness Detection: a Comparative Study

Spoofing attacks carried out using artificial replicas are a severe threat for fingerprint-based biometric systems and, thus, require the development of effective countermeasures. One possible protection method is to implement software modules that analyze fingerprint images to tell live from fake samples. Most of the static software-based approaches in the literature are based on various image features, each with its own strengths, weaknesses, and discriminative power. Such features can be seen as different and often complementary views of the object in analysis, and their fusion is likely to improve the classification accuracy. This paper aims at assessing the potential of these feature fusion approaches in the area of fingerprint liveness detection by analyzing different features and different methods for their aggregation. Experiments on publicly available benchmarks show the effectiveness of feature fusion methods, which improve the accuracy of those based on individual features and are competitive with respect to the alternative methods, such as the ones based on convolutional neural networks.