Sensor-assisted facial recognition: an enhanced biometric authentication system for smartphones

Shaxun Chen, Amit Pande, Prasant Mohapatra

Abstract: Facial recognition is a popular biometric authentica-tion technique, but it is rarely used in practice for de-vice unlock or website / app login in smartphones, alt-hough most of them are equipped with a front-facing camera. Security issues (e.g. 2D media attack and vir-tual camera attack) and ease of use are two important factors that impede the prevalence of facial authentica-tion in mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a new sensor-assisted facial authentication method to over-come these limitations. Our system uses motion and light sensors to defend against 2D media attacks and virtual camera attacks without the penalty of authenti-cation speed. We conduct experiments to validate our method. Results show 95-97% detection rate and 2-3% false alarm rate over 450 trials in real-settings, indicat-ing high security obtained by the scheme ten times faster than existing 3D facial authentications (3 sec-onds compared to 30 seconds).