Detecting face liveness
Amazon Rekognition Face Liveness helps you verify that a user going through facial verification is physically present in front of a camera. It detects spoof attacks presented to a camera or trying to bypass a camera. Users can complete a Face Liveness check by taking a short video selfie where they follow a series of prompts intended to verify their presence.
Face Liveness is determined with a probabilistic calculation, and then a confidence score (between 0–100) is returned after the check. The higher the score, the greater the confidence that the person taking the check is live. Face Liveness also returns a frame, called a reference image that can be used for face comparison and search. As with any probability-based system, Face Liveness cannot guarantee perfect results. Use it with other factors to make a risk-based decision about the personal identity of users.
Face Liveness uses multiple components:
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AWS Amplify SDK (React
, Swift (iOS ), and Android ) with FaceLivenessDetector component -
AWS SDKs
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AWS Cloud APIs
When you configure your application to integrate with Face Liveness feature, it uses the following API operations:
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CreateFaceLivenessSession - Starts a Face Liveness session, letting the Face Liveness detection model be used in your application. Returns a SessionId for the created session.
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StartFaceLivenessSession - Called by the AWS Amplify FaceLivenessDetector. Starts an event stream containing information about relevant events and attributes in the current session.
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GetFaceLivenessSessionResults - Retrieves the results of a specific Face Liveness session, including a Face Liveness confidence score, reference image, and audit images.
You will use the AWS Amplify SDK to integrate the Face Liveness feature with your face-based verification workflows for web applications. When users onboard or authenticate through your application, send them to the Face Liveness check workflow in the Amplify SDK. The Amplify SDK handles user interface and real-time feedback for users while they capture their video selfie.
When the user’s face moves into the oval displayed on their device, the Amplify SDK displays a sequence of colored lights on the screen. It then securely streams the selfie video to the cloud APIs. The cloud APIs carry out real-time analysis with advanced ML models. After the analysis is complete, you receive the following on the backend:
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A Face Liveness confidence score (between 0 and 100)
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A high-quality image called reference image that can be used for face match or face search
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A set of up to four images, called audit images, selected from the selfie video
Face Liveness can be leveraged for a variety of use cases. For example, Face Liveness can be used along with face matching (with CompareFaces and SearchFacesByImage) for identity verification, for age estimation on platforms with age-based access restriction, and for detecting real human users while detering bots.
You can learn more about the use cases for which the service is intended, how machine
learning (ML) is used by the service, and key considerations in the responsible design and
use of the service in Rekognition Face Liveness AI service card
You can set thresholds for Face Liveness and face match confidence scores. Your chosen thresholds should reflect your use case. You then send an identity verification approval/denial to the user based on the score being above or below the thresholds. If denied, ask the user to try again or send them to another method.
The following graphic demonstrates the user flow, from instructions to liveness check to returned result:
