Glossary
Liveness Detection
Liveness detection verifies that a biometric sample presented to a sensor comes from an actual live person present at the moment of capture, rather than a photo held up to a camera, a recorded fingerprint replica, or an increasingly convincing synthetic reproduction. Without this check, a biometric system verifies only that a matching pattern was presented, not that a genuine, present person is the one presenting it — a distinction that matters enormously once biometric spoofing techniques become sophisticated enough to fool the matching step alone.
This is a necessary companion to biometric matching itself, not an optional add-on: a matching algorithm that's excellent at comparing a presented sample against a stored template is still fully vulnerable to a convincing fake if nothing separately confirms that the sample came from a live, present person rather than a captured reproduction of one.