Face liveness detection by learning multispectral reflectance distributions

Existing face liveness detection algorithms adopt behavioural challenge-response methods that require user cooperation. To be verified live, users are expected to obey some user unfriendly requirement. In this paper, we present a multispectral face liveness detection method, which is user cooperation free. Moreover, the system is adaptive to various user-system distances. Using the Lambertian model, we analyze multispectral properties of human skin versus non-skin, and the discriminative wavelengths are then chosen. Reflectance data of genuine and fake faces at multi-distances are selected to form a training set. An SVM classifier is trained to learn the multispectral distribution for a final Genuine-or-Fake classification. Compared with previous works, the proposed method has the following advantages: (a) The requirement on the users' cooperation is no longer needed, making the liveness detection user friendly and fast. (b) The system can work without restricted distance requirement from the target being analyzed. Experiments are conducted on genuine versus planar face data, and genuine versus mask face data. Furthermore a comparison with the visible challenge-response liveness detection method is also given. The experimental results clearly demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous systems.