Access Control in Smart Homes by Android-Based Liveness Detection

Technologies for personal safety and security play an increasing role in modern life, and are among the most valuable features expected to be supported by so-called smart homes. This paper presents a low-complexity Android application designed for both mobile and embedded devices, that exploits the available on-board camera to easily capture two images of a subject, and processes them to discriminate a true 3D and live face, from a fake or printed 2D one. The liveness detection based on such a discrimination provides antispoofing capabilities to secure access control based on face recognition. The limited computational complexity of the developed application makes it suitable for practical implementation in video-entry phones based on embedded Android platforms. The results obtained are satisfactory even in different ambient light conditions, and further improvements are being developed to deal with low precision image acquisition.