Iris liveness detection methods in the mobile biometrics scenario

Biometrie systems based on iris are vulnerable to direct attacks consisting on the presentation of a fake iris to the sensor (a printed or a contact lenses iris image, among others). The mobile biometrics scenario stresses the importance of assessing the security issues. The application of countermeasures against this type of attacking scheme is the problem addressed in the present paper. Widening a previous work, several state-of-the-art iris liveness detection methods were implemented and adapted to a less-constrained scenario. The proposed method combines a feature selection step prior to the use of state-of-the-art classifiers to perform the classification based upon the "best features". Five well known existing databases for iris liveness purposes (Biosec, Clarkson, NotreDame and Warsaw) and a recently published database, MobBIOfake, with real and fake images captured in the mobile scenario were tested. The results obtained suggest that the automated segmentation step does not degrade significantly the results.