On the Impact of Different Fabrication Materials on Fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection

Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) is the task of determining whether a sample stems from a live subject (bona fide presentation) or from an artificial replica (Presentation Attack Instrument, PAI). Several PAD approaches have shown high effectiveness to successfully detect PAIs when the materials used for the fabrication of these PAIs are known a priori. However, most of these PAD methods do not take into account the characteristics of PAIs’ species in order to generalise to new, realistic and more challenging scenarios, where materials might be unknown. Based on that fact, in this work, we explore the impact of different PAI species, fabricated with different materials, on several local-based descriptors combined with the Fisher Vector feature encoding, in order to increase the robustness to unknown attacks. The experimental results over the well-established benchmarks of the LivDet 2011, LivDet 2013 and LivDet 2015 competitions reported error rates outperforming the top state-of-the-art in the presence of unknown attacks. Moreover, the evaluation revealed the differences in the detection performance due to the variability between the PAI species.