Fingerphoto spoofing in mobile devices: A preliminary study

TLDR: This research is aimed at understanding the effect of spoofing on fingerphoto spoofing, and creating a large spoofed fingerphoto database and making it publicly available for research.

Abstract: Biometric-based authentication for smart handheld devices promises to provide a reliable and alternate security mechanism compared to traditional methods such as pins, patterns, and passwords. Although fingerprints are a viable source for authentication, they generally require installation of an additional hardware such as optical and swipe sensors on mobile devices, and are only available in expensive, high-end smartphones. Alternatively, fingerphoto images captured using the smartphone camera for authentication is one of the promising biometric approaches. However, using fingerphotos for authentication brings along a major challenge of fingerphoto spoofing. This research is aimed at understanding the effect of spoofing on fingerphotos. There are three major contributions of this research: (i) create a large spoofed fingerphoto database and make it publicly available for research, (ii) to establish the effect of print attack and photo attack in fingerphoto spoofing, and (iii) understand the performance of existing spoofing detection algorithms on fingerphoto spoofing.