SonarGuard: Ultrasonic Face Liveness Detection on Mobile Devices

Liveness detection has been widely applied in face authentication systems to combat malicious attacks. However, existing methods purely depending on visual frames become vulnerable once visual perception is not reliable. The emerging face spoof and forge techniques urge the systems to exploit the defensive potential of non-visual modalities. To tackle this challenge, we introduce SonarGuard, a system combining ultrasonic and visual information to achieve robust liveness detection on mobile devices. More specifically, SonarGuard simultaneously extracts micro-doppler signatures from ultrasound reflections and motion trajectories from video frames both corresponding to the user’s lip movement. To further confirm the collected ultrasonic and visual information is not derived from malicious audio/video attacks, we consolidate the system via introducing a cross-modal matching mechanism, which demands the inherent consistency between these two modalities. Extensive experiments on a new dataset collected with existing mobile devices demonstrate that the proposed system could achieve average classification error rate of 0.91% under presentation attacks. This result indicates that SonarGuard can boost the security of face authenfication systems in real world usage without additional hardware modification.