A Preliminary Study of Fake Fingerprints

Fingerprint is a widely used biometrics. Its extensive usage motivates imposter to fabricate fake fingerprints. Vitality detection has been proposed to prevent counterfeit finger attack. Currently the detection can be done either during the process of acquiring fingerprint image or by comparing multiple sequentially acquired images. It is an ongoing research problem to detect whether a given fingerprint image is obtained from a real or a fake fingertip. In this paper we look into the differences between real and fake fingerprints as the first step to approach this problem. Specifically, we study the effects of different imaging sensors on the sizes of templates and on the matching scores between real and fake fingerprints. We also compare the fake fingerprints made from different materials. Experiments are carried out with two publicly available fingerprint databases and the findings are reported.