Face spoofing detection using dynamic texture

Abstract

While there is a significant number of works addressing e.g. pose and illumination variation problems in face recognition, the vulnerabilities to spoofing attacks were mostly unexplored until very recently when an increasing attention is started to be paid to this threat. A spoofing attack occurs when a person tries to masquerade as someone else e.g. by wearing a mask to gain illegitimate access and advantages. This work provides the first investigation in research literature on the use of dynamic texture for face spoofing detection. Unlike masks and 3D head models, real faces are indeed non-rigid objects with contractions of facial muscles which result in temporally deformed facial features such as eye lids and lips. Our key idea is to learn the structure and the dynamics of the facial micro-textures that characterise only real faces but not fake ones. Hence, we introduce a novel and appealing approach to face spoofing detection using the spatiotemporal (dynamic texture) extensions of the highly popular local binary pattern approach. We experiment with two publicly available databases consisting of several fake face attacks of different natures under varying conditions and imaging qualities. The experiments show excellent results beyond the state-of-the-art. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.