Face recognition under spoofing attacks: countermeasures and research directions

Among tangible threats facing current biometric systems are spoofing attacks. A spoofing attack occurs when a person tries to masquerade as someone else by falsifying data and thereby attempting to gain illegitimate access and advantages. Recently, an increasing attention has been given to this research problem, as can be attested by the growing number of articles and the various competitions that appear in major biometric forums. This study presents a comprehensive overview of the recent advances in face anti-spoofing state-of-the-art, discussing existing methodologies, available benchmarking databases, reported results and, more importantly, the open issues and future research directions. As a case study for illustration, a face anti-spoofing method is described, which employs a colour local binary pattern descriptor to jointly analyse colour and texture available from the luminance and chrominance channels. Two publicly available databases are used for the analysis, and the importance of inter-database evaluation to attest the generalisation capabilities of an anti-spoofing method is discussed.