Is that eye dead or alive? Detecting new iris biometrics attacks

Abstract

Iris recognition has been revolutionising biometric-based human identification for almost three decades, due to the unprecedented information richness of iris patterns translating into low false matches – which has now been observed across a population exceeding 1 billion users worldwide. We are also able to effectively detect those presentation attack types known to our algorithms during the design phase. But the question remains: are we prepared to detect those unknown specimens, strikingly similar to images of authentic irises, that can be generated by modern artificial intelligence tools or – more gruesomely – captured from decedents?