Biometric presentation attack detection: beyond the visible spectrum

The increased need for unattended authentication in multiple scenarios has motivated a wide deployment of biometric systems in the last few years. This has in turn led to the disclosure of security concerns specifically related to biometric systems. Among them, presentation attacks (PAs, i.e., attempts to log into the system with a fake biometric characteristic or presentation attack instrument) pose a severe threat to the security of the system: any person could eventually fabricate or order a gummy finger or face mask to impersonate someone else. In this context, we present a novel fingerprint presentation attack detection (PAD) scheme based on i) a new capture device able to acquire images within the short wave infrared (SWIR) spectrum, and i i) an in-depth analysis of several state-of-theart techniques based on both handcrafted and deep learning features. The approach is evaluated on a database comprising over 4700 samples, stemming from 562 different subjects and 35 different presentation attack instrument (PAI) species. The results show the soundness of the proposed approach with a detection equal error rate (D-EER) as low as 1.35% even in a realistic scenario where five different PAI species are considered only for testing purposes (i.e., unknown attacks

Banks Net Interest Margin and the Level of Interest Rates

An increase in the level of interest rates is said to have a negative impact on banks net interest margins in the short run. Using a time series of more than 40 years for the German banking system, we show that the opposite effect exists in the long run, where an increase in the level of interest rates by 100 basis points leads to an estimated increase of 7 basis points in the banks net interest margin. In addition, we analyze the consequences of the low-interest rate environment and find that banks interest margins for retail deposits, especially for term deposits, have declined by up to 97 basis points

Homomorphic Encryption for Speaker Recognition: Protection of Biometric Templates and Vendor Model Parameters

Data privacy is crucial when dealing with biometric data. Accounting for the latest European data privacy regulation and payment service directive, biometric template protection is essential for any commercial application. Ensuring unlinkability across biometric service operators, irreversibility of leaked encrypted templates, and renewability of e.g., voice models following the i-vector paradigm, biometric voice-based systems are prepared for the latest EU data privacy legislation. Employing Paillier cryptosystems, Euclidean and cosine comparators are known to ensure data privacy demands, without loss of discrimination nor calibration performance. Bridging gaps from template protection to speaker recognition, two architectures are proposed for the two-covariance comparator, serving as a generative model in this study. The first architecture preserves privacy of biometric data capture subjects. In the second architecture, model parameters of the comparator are encrypted as well, such that biometric service providers can supply the same comparison modules employing different key pairs to multiple biometric service operators. An experimental proof-of-concept and complexity analysis is carried out on the data from the 2013-2014 NIST i-vector machine learning challenge

¿Se pueden alcanzar los objetivos de la escuela de Frankfurt mediante la teoría del reconocimiento? Reflexiones a propósito de la controversia en el campo de la filosofía política de Nancy Fraser y Axel Honneth

De los estudios en ciencias sociales de mayor impacto se deduce que la política de mercantilización y desestructuración de las instituciones del Estado social practicada en los últimos treinta años, pri mero en Gran Bretaña, los Estados Unidos y Nueva Zelanda y después en el continente europeo, generará formas de empleo que, cada vez más, serían experimentadas por las personas como pro blemáticas o amenazantes (cf ., p. ej ., Bourdieu et al., 1997, Castel, 2000 y 2005, así como Sennet 1998 y 2005). Parecen responsables de este hecho, ante todo, las exigencias de movilidad que aumentan con la flexibilización de las estructuras de empleo, así como también un fuerte incremento de las ocupaciones inestables y mal pagadas (como, por ejemplo, los trabajos tempora les o a tiempo parcial). Según la apreciación de destacados sociólogos, aquellas estructuras de ocupación resultan problemáticas para muchas personas no únicamente en sentido material, sino también en sentido normativo: no sólo acarrean una situación de conflict o en el mantenimiento de la propia vida, sino que también dificultan la formación del autoaprecio y de la autoestima de una parte de la ciudadanía. A la vista de esta circunstancias , no resulta sorprendente que las cuesti ones del mundo del trabajo hayan sido discutidas ampliamente por personas que se dedican tanto a las ciencias sociales y a la ética de la economía, como también a la filosofía política o social. Para la Teoría Crítica en la tradición de la Escuela de Frankfurt , la discusión sobre los modernos mundos del trabajo resulta tradicionalmente un tema central. La peculiaridad de su planteamiento (interdis ciplinar) consiste , según la convicción de dos de sus más prominentes representantes, en : fusionar aquellos planos que provienen de la filosofía moral, de la teoría de la sociedad y del análisis político, en una teoría crítica del capitalismo (Fraser & Honnet h, 2003: 10). Lo que se plantea en esta perspectiva es un análisis y una crítica

Associations between stress and migraine and tension-type headache: Results from a school-based study in adolescents from grammar schools in Germany

Introduction: Stress is considered the major contributor to migraine and tension-type headache in adolescents. Previous studies have focused on general stressors, whereas the aim of the present study was to investigate associations between individuals’ stressful experiences and different types of headache. Methods: Adolescents from 10th and 11th grades of grammar schools filled in questionnaires. Stressful experiences were measured with the Trier Inventory of Chronic Stress. Type of headache was classified according to the International Classification of Headache Disorders. Linear regressions, adjusted for sex and grade, were calculated to estimate differences in stress scores that can be attributed to migraine, tension-type headache or miscellaneous headache. Results: A total of 1260 questionnaires were analysed. Tension-type headache, migraine and co-existing migraine plus tension-type headache were found in 48.7%, 10.2% and 19.8% of the participants. In subjects with migraine or co-existing migraine plus tension-type headache, high increases in stress scores were found in all investigated dimensions, whereas much weaker and inconsistent associations were found in subjects with tension-type headache only. Conclusions: The characteristic of migraine is more associated with stressful experiences than this is the case for tensiontype headache. This suggests that adolescent migraine patients might specially benefit from behavioural interventions regarding stress