9. Introduction to Face Presentation Attack Detection

The main scope of this chapter is to serve as a brief introduction to face presentation attack detection. The next pages present the different presentation attacks that a face recognition system can confront, in which an attacker presents to the sensor, mainly a camera, an artifact (generally a photograph, a video, or a mask) to try to impersonate a genuine user. First, we make an introduction of the current status of face recognition, its level of deployment, and the challenges it faces. In addition, we present the vulnerabilities and the possible attacks that a biometric system may be exposed to, showing that way the high importance of presentation attack detection methods. We review different types of presentation attack methods, from simpler to more complex ones, and in which cases they could be effective. Later, we summarize the most popular presentation attack detection methods to deal with these attacks. Finally, we introduce public datasets used by the research community for exploring the vulnerabilities of face biometrics and developing effective countermeasures against known spoofs.