Database of iris printouts and its application: Development of liveness detection method for iris recognition

Liveness detection (often referred to as presentation attack detection) is the ability to detect artificial objects presented to a biometric device with an intention to subvert the recognition system. This paper presents the database of iris printout images with a controlled quality, and its fundamental application, namely development of liveness detection method for iris recognition. The database gathers images of only those printouts that were accepted by an example commercial camera, i.e. the iris template calculated for an artefact was matched to the corresponding iris reference of the living eye. This means that the quality of the employed imitations is not accidental and precisely controlled. The database consists of 729 printout images for 243 different eyes, and 1274 images of the authentic eyes, corresponding to imitations. It may thus serve as a good benchmark for at least two challenges: a) assessment of the liveness detection algorithms, and b) assessment of the eagerness of matching real and fake samples by iris recognition methods. To our best knowledge, the iris printout database of such properties is the first worldwide published as of today. In its second part, the paper presents an example application of this database, i.e. the development of liveness detection method based on iris image frequency analysis. We discuss how to select frequency windows and regions of interest to make the method sensitive to “alien frequencies” resulting from the printing process. The proposed method shows a very promising results, since it may be configured to achieve no false alarms when the rate of accepting the iris printouts is approximately 5% (i.e. 95% of presentation attack trials are correctly identified). This favorable compares to the results of commercial equipment used in the database development, as this device accepted all the printouts used. The method employs the same image as used in iris recognition process, hence no investments into the capture devices is required, and may be applied also to other carriers for printed iris patterns, e.g. contact lens.