Marco Micheletto

Marco Micheletto, Roberto Casula, Giulia Orrù et al.

The International Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet) is a biennial event that invites academic and industry participants to prove their advancements in Fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection (PAD). This edition, LivDet2023, proposed two challenges, Liveness Detection in Action and Fingerprint Representation, to evaluate the efficacy of PAD embedded in verification systems and the effectiveness and compactness of feature sets. A third, hidden challenge is the inclusion of two subsets in the training set whose sensor information is unknown, testing participants ability to generalize their models. Only bona fide fingerprint samples were provided to participants, and the competition reports and assesses the performance of their algorithms suffering from this limitation in data availability.

Irene Amerini, Mauro Barni, Sebastiano Battiato et al.

AI-generated synthetic media, also called Deepfakes, have significantly influenced so many domains, from entertainment to cybersecurity. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) and Diffusion Models (DMs) are the main frameworks used to create Deepfakes, producing highly realistic yet fabricated content. While these technologies open up new creative possibilities, they also bring substantial ethical and security risks due to their potential misuse. The rise of such advanced media has led to the development of a cognitive bias known as Impostor Bias, where individuals doubt the authenticity of multimedia due to the awareness of AI's capabilities. As a result, Deepfake detection has become a vital area of research, focusing on identifying subtle inconsistencies and artifacts with machine learning techniques, especially Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Research in forensic Deepfake technology encompasses five main areas: detection, attribution and recognition, passive authentication, detection in realistic scenarios, and active authentication. This paper reviews the primary algorithms that address these challenges, examining their advantages, limitations, and future prospects.

Marco Micheletto, Giulia Orrù, Luca Ghiani et al.

Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) systems are usually designed independently of the fingerprint verification system. While this can be acceptable for use cases where specific user templates are not predetermined, it represents a missed opportunity to enhance security in scenarios where integrating PAD with the fingerprint verification system could significantly leverage users' templates, which are the real target of a potential presentation attack. This does not mean that a PAD should be specifically designed for such users; that would imply the availability of many enrolled users' PAI and, consequently, complexity, time, and cost increase. On the contrary, we propose to equip a basic PAD, designed according to the state of the art, with an innovative add-on module called the Closeness Binary Code (CC) module. The term "closeness" refers to a peculiar property of the bona fide-related features: in an Euclidean feature space, genuine fingerprints tend to cluster in a specific pattern. First, samples from the same finger are close to each other, then samples from other fingers of the same user and finally, samples from fingers of other users. This property is statistically verified in our previous publication, and further confirmed in this paper. It is independent of the user population and the feature set class, which can be handcrafted or deep network-based (embeddings). Therefore, the add-on can be designed without the need for the targeted user samples; moreover, it exploits her/his samples' "closeness" property during the verification stage. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets and state-of-the-art PAD methods confirm the benefits of the proposed add-on, which can be easily coupled with the main PAD module integrated into the fingerprint verification system.

Gianpaolo Perelli, Andrea Panzino, Roberto Casula et al.

The impact of voice disorders is becoming more widely acknowledged as a public health issue. Several machine learning-based classifiers with the potential to identify disorders have been used in recent studies to differentiate between normal and pathological voices and sounds. In this paper, we focus on analyzing the vulnerabilities of these systems by exploring the possibility of attacks that can reverse classification and compromise their reliability. Given the critical nature of personal health information, understanding which types of attacks are effective is a necessary first step toward improving the security of such systems. Starting from the original audios, we implement various attack methods, including adversarial, evasion, and pitching techniques, and evaluate how state-of-the-art disorder detection models respond to them. Our findings identify the most effective attack strategies, underscoring the need to address these vulnerabilities in machine-learning systems used in the healthcare domain.

Marco Micheletto, Giulia Orrù, Roberto Casula et al.

Fingerprint authentication systems are highly vulnerable to artificial reproductions of fingerprint, called fingerprint presentation attacks. Detecting presentation attacks is not trivial because attackers refine their replication techniques from year to year. The International Fingerprint liveness Detection Competition (LivDet), an open and well-acknowledged meeting point of academies and private companies that deal with the problem of presentation attack detection, has the goal to assess the performance of fingerprint presentation attack detection (FPAD) algorithms by using standard experimental protocols and data sets. Each LivDet edition, held biannually since 2009, is characterized by a different set of challenges against which competitors must be dealt with. The continuous increase of competitors and the noticeable decrease in error rates across competitions demonstrate a growing interest in the topic. This paper reviews the LivDet editions from 2009 to 2021 and points out their evolution over the years.

Giulia Orrù, Marco Micheletto, Fabio Terranova et al.

In this study we investigate a textural processing method of electroencephalography (EEG) signal as an indicator to estimate the driver's vigilance in a hypothetical Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) system. The novelty of the solution proposed relies on employing the one-dimensional Local Binary Pattern (1D-LBP) algorithm for feature extraction from pre-processed EEG data. From the resulting feature vector, the classification is done according to three vigilance classes: awake, tired and drowsy. The claim is that the class transitions can be detected by describing the variations of the micro-patterns' occurrences along the EEG signal. The 1D-LBP is able to describe them by detecting mutual variations of the signal temporarily "close" as a short bit-code. Our analysis allows to conclude that the 1D-LBP adoption has led to significant performance improvement. Moreover, capturing the class transitions from the EEG signal is effective, although the overall performance is not yet good enough to develop a BCI for assessing the driver's vigilance in real environments.