Spoofing The widespread use of personal verification systems based on fingerprints has shown some weaknesses related to the problem of security.
Among the others, it is well-known that a fingerprint verification system can be deceived by submitting artificial reproductions of fingerprints made up of silicon or gelatine to the electronic capture device (optical or capacitive). These images are then processed as “true” fingerprints.
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Liveness Detection Therefore, a recent issue in the field of security in fingerprint verification (unsupervised especially) is known as “liveness detection”. The standard verification system is coupled with additional hardware or software modules aimed to certify the authenticity of the submitted fingerprints. Whilst hardware-based solutions are the most expensive, software-based ones attempt to measure liveness from characteristics of images themselves by simply applying image processing algorithms.

Software Liveness Classification The problem of vitality detection is treated as a two-class classification problem (live or fake). An appropriate classifier is designed in order to extract the probability of the image vitality given the extracted set of features. LivDet2009 competition is open to all academic and industrial institutions which have a solution for software-based fingerprint vitality detection problem.

LivDet2009 Competition Overview Each participant is invited to submit its algorithm in an Win32 console application. The performance will be evaluated by utilizing a very large data set of “fake” and “live” fingerprint images captured with three different optical scanners. The performance rank will be compiled and published in this site and the best algorithm will win the “Best Fingerprint Liveness Detection Algorithm Award” at ICIAP 2009. A Special Session of ICIAP 2009 will be devoted to present and discuss the experimental results.