In recent years, fingerprint authentication has gained widespread adoption in diverse identification systems, including smartphones, wearable devices, and attendance machines, etc. Nonetheless, these systems are vulnerable to spoofing attacks from suspicious fingerprints, posing significant risks to privacy. Consequently, a fingerprint presentation attack detection (PAD) strategy is proposed to ensure the security of these systems. Most of the previous work concentrated on how to build a deep learning framework to improve the PAD performance by augmenting fingerprint samples, and little attention has been paid to the fundamental difference between live and fake fingerprints to optimize feature extractors. This paper proposes a new fingerprint liveness detection method based on Siamese attention residual convolutional neural network (Res‐CNN) that offers an interpretative perspective to this challenge. To leverage the variance in ridge continuity features (RCFs) between live and fake fingerprints, a Gabor filter is utilized to enhance the texture details of the fingerprint ridges, followed by the construction of an attention Res‐CNN model to extract RCF between the live and fake fingerprints. The model mitigates the performance deterioration caused by gradient disappearance. Furthermore, to highlight the difference in RCF, a Siamese attention residual network is devised, and the ridge continuity amplification loss function is designed to optimize the training process. Ultimately, the RCF parameters are transferred to the model, and transfer learning is utilized to aid its acquisition, thereby assuring the model’s interpretability. The experimental outcomes conducted on three publicly accessible fingerprint datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method, exhibiting remarkable performance in both true detection rate and average classification error rate. Moreover, our method exhibits remarkable capabilities in PAD tasks, including cross‐material experiments and cross‐sensor experiments. Additionally, we leverage Gradient‐weighted Class Activation Mapping to generate a heatmap that visualizes the interpretability of our model, offering a compelling visual validation.
