Counter-measures to photo attacks in face recognition: A public database and a baseline

Abstract

A common technique to by-pass 2-D face recognition systems is to use photographs of spoofed identities. Unfortunately, research in counter-measures to this type of attack have not kept-up - even if such threats have been known for nearly a decade, there seems to exist no consensus on best practices, techniques or protocols for developing and testing spoofing-detectors for face recognition. We attribute the reason for this delay, partly, to the unavailability of public databases and protocols to study solutions and compare results. To this purpose we introduce the publicly available PRINT-ATTACK database and exemplify how to use its companion protocol with a motion-based algorithm that detects correlations between the person's head movements and the scene context. The results are to be used as basis for comparison to other counter-measure techniques. The PRINT-ATTACK database contains 200 videos of real-accesses and 200 videos of spoof attempts using printed photographs of 50 different identities.