Iris liveness detection for mobile devices based on local descriptors

•We propose to use local binary patterns (LBP) on image residual for iris liveness detection.•Low-complexity interpolation-free implementation enables use on mobile devices.•Performance is promising for both print-based and screen-based attacks.

Iris recognition is well suited to authentication on mobile devices, due to its intrinsic security and non-intrusiveness. However, authentication systems can be easily tricked by attacks based on high-quality printing. A liveness detection module is therefore necessary. Here, we propose a fast and accurate technique to detect printed-iris attacks based on the local binary pattern (LBP) descriptor. In order to improve the discrimination ability of LBP and better explore the image statistics, LBP is performed on a high-pass version of the image with 3 × 3 integer kernel. In addition a simplified interpolation-free descriptor is considered and finally a linear SVM classification scheme is used. The detection performance, measured on standard databases, is extremely promising, despite the resulting very low complexity, which makes possible the implementation for the relatively small CPU processing power of a mobile device.