LiveScreen: Video Chat Liveness Detection Leveraging Skin Reflection

Abstract

The rapid advancement of social media and communication technology enables video chat to become an important and convenient way of daily communication. However, such convenience also makes personal video clips easily obtained and exploited by malicious users who launch scam attacks. Existing studies only deal with the attacks that use fabricated facial masks, while the liveness detection that targets the playback attacks using a virtual camera is still elusive. In this work, we develop a novel video chat liveness detection system, LiveScreen, which can track the weak light changes reflected off the skin of a human face leveraging chromatic eigenspace differences. We design an inconspicuous challenge frame with minimal intervention to the video chat and develop a robust anomaly frame detector to verify the liveness of the remote user in the video chat using the response to the challenge frame. Furthermore, we propose resilient defense strategies to defeat both naive and intelligent playback attacks leveraging spatial and temporal verification. We implemented a prototype over both laptop and smartphone platforms and conducted extensive experiments in various realistic scenarios. We show that our system can achieve robust liveness detection with accuracy and false detection rates 97.7% (94.8%) and 1% (1.6%) on smartphones (laptops), respectively.