Is physics-based liveness detection truly possible with a single image?

Face recognition is an increasingly popular method for user authentication. However, face recognition is susceptible to playback attacks. Therefore, a reliable way to detect malicious attacks is crucial to the robustness of the system. We propose and validate a novel physics-based method to detect images recaptured from printed material using only a single image. Micro-textures present in printed paper manifest themselves in the specular component of the image. Features extracted from this component allows a linear SVM classifier to achieve 2.2% False Acceptance Rate and 13% False Rejection Rate (6.7% Equal Error Rate). We also show that the classifier can be generalizable to contrast enhanced recaptured images and LCD screen recaptured images without re-training, demonstrating the robustness of our approach.