Face Liveness Detection Using Thermal Face-CNN with External Knowledge

Face liveness detection is important for ensuring security. However, because faces are shown in photographs or on a display, it is difficult to detect the real face using the features of the face shape. In this paper, we propose a thermal face-convolutional neural network (Thermal Face-CNN) that knows the external knowledge regarding the fact that the real face temperature of the real person is 36 similar to 37 degrees on average. First, we compared the red, green, and blue (RGB) image with the thermal image to identify the data suitable for face liveness detection using a multi-layer neural network (MLP), convolutional neural network (CNN), and C-support vector machine (C-SVM). Next, we compared the performance of the algorithms and the newly proposed Thermal Face-CNN in a thermal image dataset. The experiment results show that the thermal image is more suitable than the RGB image for face liveness detection. Further, we also found that Thermal Face-CNN performs better than CNN, MLP, and C-SVM when the precision is slightly more crucial than recall through F-measure.