The use of an artificial replica of a biometric characteristic in an attempt to circumvent a system is an example of a biometric presentation attack. Liveness detection is one of the proposed countermeasures, and has been widely implemented in fingerprint and iris recognition systems in recent years to reduce the consequences of spoof attacks. The goal for the Liveness Detection (LivDet) competitions is to compare software-based iris liveness detection methodologies using a standardized testing protocol and large quantities of spoof and live images. Three submissions were received for the competition Part 1; Biometric Recognition Group de Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, University of Naples Federico II, and Faculdade de Engenharia de Universidade do Porto. The best results from across all three datasets was from Federico with a rate of falsely rejected live samples of 28.6% and the rate of falsely accepted fake samples of 5.7%.

The presence of a contact lens, particularly a textured cosmetic lens, poses a challenge to iris recognition as it obfuscates the natural iris patterns. The main contribution of this paper is to present an in-depth analysis of the effect of contact lenses on iris recognition. Two databases, namely, the IIIT-D Iris Contact Lens database and the ND-Contact Lens database, are prepared to analyze the variations caused due to contact lenses. We also present a novel lens detection algorithm that can be used to reduce the effect of contact lenses. The proposed approach outperforms other lens detection algorithms on the two databases and shows improved iris recognition performance.