Biometrics systems have significantly improved person identification and authentication, playing an important role in personal, national, and global security. However, these systems might be deceived (or spoofed) and, despite the recent advances in spoofing detection, current solutions often rely on domain knowledge, specific biometric reading systems, and attack types. We assume a very limited knowledge about biometric spoofing at the sensor to derive outstanding spoofing detection systems for iris, face, and fingerprint modalities based on two deep learning approaches. The first approach consists of learning suitable convolutional network architectures for each domain, whereas the second approach focuses on learning the weights of the network via back propagation. We consider nine biometric spoofing benchmarks - each one containing real and fake samples of a given biometric modality and attack type - and learn deep representations for each benchmark by combining and contrasting the two learning approaches. This strategy not only provides better comprehension of how these approaches interplay, but also creates systems that exceed the best known results in eight out of the nine benchmarks. The results strongly indicate that spoofing detection systems based on convolutional networks can be robust to attacks already known and possibly adapted, with little effort, to image-based attacks that are yet to come.

Despite important recent advances, the vulnerability of biometric systems to spoofing attacks is still an open problem. Spoof attacks occur when impostor users present synthetic biometric samples of a valid user to the biometric system seeking to deceive it. Considering the case of face biometrics, a spoofing attack consists in presenting a fake sample (e.g., photograph, digital video, or even a 3D mask) to the acquisition sensor with the facial information of a valid user. In this paper, we introduce a low cost and software-based method for detecting spoofing attempts in face recognition systems. Our hypothesis is that during acquisition, there will be inevitable artifacts left behind in the recaptured biometric samples allowing us to create a discriminative signature of the video generated by the biometric sensor. To characterize these artifacts, we extract time-spectral feature descriptors from the video, which can be understood as a low-level feature descriptor that gathers temporal and spectral information across the biometric sample and use the visual codebook concept to find mid-level feature descriptors computed from the low-level ones. Such descriptors are more robust for detecting several kinds of attacks than the low-level ones. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method for detecting different types of attacks in a variety of scenarios and data sets, including photos, videos, and 3D masks.

Spoofing attacks or impersonation can be easily accomplished in a facial biometric system wherein users without access privileges attempt to authenticate themselves as valid users, in which an impostor needs only a photograph or a video with facial information of a legitimate user. Even with recent advances in biometrics, information forensics and security, vulnerability of facial biometric systems against spoofing attacks is still an open problem. Even though several methods have been proposed for photo-based spoofing attack detection, attacks performed with videos have been vastly overlooked, which hinders the use of the facial biometric systems in modern applications. In this paper, we present an algorithm for video-based spoofing attack detection through the analysis of global information which is invariant to content, since we discard video contents and analyze content-independent noise signatures present in the video related to the unique acquisition processes. Our approach takes advantage of noise signatures generated by the recaptured video to distinguish between fake and valid access videos. For that, we use the Fourier spectrum followed by the computation of video visual rhythms and the extraction of different characterization methods. For evaluation, we consider the novel unicamp video-attack database, which comprises 17 076 videos composed of real access and spoofing attack videos. In addition, we evaluate the proposed method using the replay-attack database, which contains photo-based and video-based face spoofing attacks.

As a crucial security problem, anti-spoofing in biometrics, and particularly for the face modality, has achieved great progress in the recent years. Still, new threats arrive inform of better, more realistic and more sophisticated spoofing attacks. The objective of the 2nd Competition on Counter Measures to 2D Face Spoofing Attacks is to challenge researchers to create counter measures effectively detecting a variety of attacks. The submitted propositions are evaluated on the Replay-Attack database and the achieved results are presented in this paper.

Pollution in the form of litter in the natural environment is one of the great challenges of our times. Automated litter detection can help assess waste occurrences in the environment. Different machine learning solutions have been explored to develop litter detection tools, thereby supporting research, citizen science, and volunteer clean-up initiatives. However, to the best of our knowledge, no work has investigated the performance of state-of-the-art deep learning object detection approaches in the context of litter detection. In particular, no studies have focused on the assessment of those methods aiming their use in devices with low processing capabilities, e.g., mobile phones, typically employed in citizen science activities. In this paper, we fill this literature gap. We performed a comparative study involving state-of-the-art CNN architectures (e.g., Faster RCNN, Mask-RCNN, EfficientDet, RetinaNet and YOLO-v5), two litter image datasets and a smartphone. We also introduce a new dataset for litter detection, named PlastOPol, composed of 2418 images and 5300 annotations. The experimental results demonstrate that object detectors based on the YOLO family are promising for the construction of litter detection solutions, with superior performance in terms of detection accuracy, processing time, and memory footprint.

The adoption of large-scale iris recognition systems around the world has brought to light the importance of detecting presentation attack images (textured contact lenses and printouts). This paper presents a new approach in iris presentation attack detection (PAD) by exploring combinations of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transformed input spaces through binarized statistical image features (BSIFs). Our method combines lightweight CNNs to classify multiple BSIF views of the input image. Following explorations on complementary input spaces leading to more discriminative features to detect presentation attacks, we also propose an algorithm to select the best (and most discriminative) predictors for the task at hand. An ensemble of predictors makes use of their expected individual performances to aggregate their results into a final prediction. Results show that this technique improves on the current state of the art in iris PAD, outperforming the winner of LivDet-Iris 2017 competition both for intra- and cross-dataset scenarios, and illustrating the very difficult nature of the cross-dataset scenario.