Face liveness detection is a critical preprocessing step in face recognition for avoiding face spoofing attacks, where an impostor can impersonate a valid user for authentication. While considerable research has been recently done in improving the accuracy of face liveness detection, the best current approaches use a two-step process of first applying non-linear anisotropic diffusion to the incoming image and then using a deep network for final liveness decision. Such an approach is not viable for real-time face liveness detection. We develop two end-to-end real-time solutions where nonlinear anisotropic diffusion based on an additive operator splitting scheme is first applied to an incoming static image, which enhances the edges and surface texture, and preserves the boundary locations in the real image. The diffused image is then forwarded to a pre-trained Specialized Convolutional Neural Network (SCNN) and the Inception network version 4, which identify the complex and deep features for face liveness classification. We evaluate the performance of our integrated approach using the SCNN and Inception v4 on the Replay-Attack dataset and Replay-Mobile dataset. The entire architecture is created in such a manner that, once trained, the face liveness detection can be accomplished in real-time. We achieve promising results of 96.03% and 96.21% face liveness detection accuracy with the SCNN, and 94.77% and 95.53% accuracy with the Inception v4, on the Replay-Attack, and Replay-Mobile datasets, respectively. We also develop a novel deep architecture for face liveness detection on video frames that uses the diffusion of images followed by a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to classify the video sequence as real or fake. Even though the use of CNN followed by LSTM is not new, combining it with diffusion (that has proven to be the best approach for single image liveness detection) is novel. Performance evaluation of our architecture on the REPLAY-ATTACK dataset gave 98.71% test accuracy and 2.77% Half Total Error Rate (HTER), and on the REPLAY-MOBILE dataset gave 95.41% accuracy and 5.28% HTER.
Keywords: CNN-LSTM; Inception v4; Replay-Attack dataset; Replay-Mobile dataset; SCNN; diffusion; face liveness detection.