Fingerprint recognition systems are vulnerable to artificial spoof fingerprint attacks, like molds made of silicone, gelatin or Play-Doh. “Liveness detection”, which is to detect vitality information from the biometric signature itself, has been proposed to defeat these kinds of spoof attacks. The goal for the LivDet 2009 competition is to compare different methodologies for software-based fingerprint liveness detection with a common experimental protocol and large dataset of spoof and live images. This competition is open to all academic and industrial institutions which have a solution for software-based fingerprint vitality detection problem. Four submissions resulted in successful completion: Dermalog, ATVS, and two anonymous participants (one industrial and one academic). Each participant submitted an algorithm as a Win32 console application. The performance was evaluated for three datasets, from three different optical scanners, each with over 1500 images of “fake” and over 1500 images of “live” fingerprints. The best results were from the algorithm submitted by Dermalog with a performance of 2.7% FRR and 2.8% FAR for the Identix (L-1) dataset. The competition goal is to become a reference event for academic and industrial research in software-based fingerprint liveness detection and to raise the visibility of this important research area in order to decrease risk of fingerprint systems to spoof attacks.