Multispectral Palmprint Encoding and Recognition

Palmprints are emerging as a new entity in multi-modal biometrics for human identification and verification. Multispectral palmprint images captured in the visible and infrared spectrum not only contain the wrinkles and ridge structure of a palm, but also the underlying pattern of veins; making them a highly discriminating biometric identifier. In this paper, we propose a feature encoding scheme for robust and highly accurate representation and matching of multispectral palmprints. To facilitate compact storage of the feature, we design a binary hash table structure that allows for efficient matching in large databases. Comprehensive experiments for both identification and verification scenarios are performed on two public datasets -- one captured with a contact-based sensor (PolyU dataset), and the other with a contact-free sensor (CASIA dataset). Recognition results in various experimental setups show that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods. Error rates achieved by our method (0.003% on PolyU and 0.2% on CASIA) are the lowest reported in literature on both dataset and clearly indicate the viability of palmprint as a reliable and promising biometric. All source codes are publicly available.Comment: Preliminary version of this manuscript was published in ICCV 2011. Z. Khan A. Mian and Y. Hu, "Contour Code: Robust and Efficient Multispectral Palmprint Encoding for Human Recognition", International Conference on Computer Vision, 2011. MATLAB Code available: https://sites.google.com/site/zohaibnet/Home/code

Use of Coherent Point Drift in computer vision applications

This thesis presents the novel use of Coherent Point Drift in improving the robustness of a number of computer vision applications. CPD approach includes two methods for registering two images - rigid and non-rigid point set approaches which are based on the transformation model used. The key characteristic of a rigid transformation is that the distance between points is preserved, which means it can be used in the presence of translation, rotation, and scaling. Non-rigid transformations - or affine transforms - provide the opportunity of registering under non-uniform scaling and skew. The idea is to move one point set coherently to align with the second point set. The CPD method finds both the non-rigid transformation and the correspondence distance between two point sets at the same time without having to use a-priori declaration of the transformation model used. The first part of this thesis is focused on speaker identification in video conferencing. A real-time, audio-coupled video based approach is presented, which focuses more on the video analysis side, rather than the audio analysis that is known to be prone to errors. CPD is effectively utilised for lip movement detection and a temporal face detection approach is used to minimise false positives if face detection algorithm fails to perform. The second part of the thesis is focused on multi-exposure and multi-focus image fusion with compensation for camera shake. Scale Invariant Feature Transforms (SIFT) are first used to detect keypoints in images being fused. Subsequently this point set is reduced to remove outliers, using RANSAC (RANdom Sample Consensus) and finally the point sets are registered using CPD with non-rigid transformations. The registered images are then fused with a Contourlet based image fusion algorithm that makes use of a novel alpha blending and filtering technique to minimise artefacts. The thesis evaluates the performance of the algorithm in comparison to a number of state-of-the-art approaches, including the key commercial products available in the market at present, showing significantly improved subjective quality in the fused images. The final part of the thesis presents a novel approach to Vehicle Make & Model Recognition in CCTV video footage. CPD is used to effectively remove skew of vehicles detected as CCTV cameras are not specifically configured for the VMMR task and may capture vehicles at different approaching angles. A LESH (Local Energy Shape Histogram) feature based approach is used for vehicle make and model recognition with the novelty that temporal processing is used to improve reliability. A number of further algorithms are used to maximise the reliability of the final outcome. Experimental results are provided to prove that the proposed system demonstrates an accuracy in excess of 95% when tested on real CCTV footage with no prior camera calibration

Human object annotation for surveillance video forensics

A system that can automatically annotate surveillance video in a manner useful for locating a person with a given description of clothing is presented. Each human is annotated based on two appearance features: primary colors of clothes and the presence of text/logos on clothes. The annotation occurs after a robust foreground extraction stage employing a modified Gaussian mixture model-based approach. The proposed pipeline consists of a preprocessing stage where color appearance of an image is improved using a color constancy algorithm. In order to annotate color information for human clothes, we use the color histogram feature in HSV space and find local maxima to extract dominant colors for different parts of a segmented human object. To detect text/logos on clothes, we begin with the extraction of connected components of enhanced horizontal, vertical, and diagonal edges in the frames. These candidate regions are classified as text or nontext on the basis of their local energy-based shape histogram features. Further, to detect humans, a novel technique has been proposed that uses contourlet transform-based local binary pattern (CLBP) features. In the proposed method, we extract the uniform direction invariant LBP feature descriptor for contourlet transformed high-pass subimages from vertical and diagonal directional bands. In the final stage, extracted CLBP descriptors are classified by a trained support vector machine. Experimental results illustrate the superiority of our method on large-scale surveillance video data

Deep multimodal biometric recognition using contourlet derivative weighted rank fusion with human face, fingerprint and iris images

The goal of multimodal biometric recognition system is to make a decision by identifying their physiological behavioural traits. Nevertheless, the decision-making process by biometric recognition system can be extremely complex due to high dimension unimodal features in temporal domain. This paper explains a deep multimodal biometric system for human recognition using three traits, face, fingerprint and iris. With the objective of reducing the feature vector dimension in the temporal domain, first pre-processing is performed using Contourlet Transform Model. Next, Local Derivative Ternary Pattern model is applied to the pre-processed features where the feature discrimination power is improved by obtaining the coefficients that has maximum variation across pre-processed multimodality features, therefore improving recognition accuracy. Weighted Rank Level Fusion is applied to the extracted multimodal features, that efficiently combine the biometric matching scores from several modalities (i.e. face, fingerprint and iris). Finally, a deep learning framework is presented for improving the recognition rate of the multimodal biometric system in temporal domain. The results of the proposed multimodal biometric recognition framework were compared with other multimodal methods. Out of these comparisons, the multimodal face, fingerprint and iris fusion offers significant improvements in the recognition rate of the suggested multimodal biometric system

Feature Extraction and Classification of Automatically Segmented Lung Lesion Using Improved Toboggan Algorithm

The accurate detection of lung lesions from computed tomography (CT) scans is essential for clinical diagnosis. It provides valuable information for treatment of lung cancer. However, the process is exigent to achieve a fully automatic lesion detection. Here, a novel segmentation algorithm is proposed, it's an improved toboggan algorithm with a three-step framework, which includes automatic seed point selection, multi-constraints lesion extraction and the lesion refinement. Then, the features like local binary pattern (LBP), wavelet, contourlet, grey level co-occurence matrix (GLCM) are applied to each region of interest of the segmented lung lesion image to extract the texture features such as contrast, homogeneity, energy, entropy and statistical extraction like mean, variance, standard deviation, convolution of modulated and normal frequencies. Finally, support vector machine (SVM) and K-nearest neighbour (KNN) classifiers are applied to classify the abnormal region based on the performance of the extracted features and their performance is been compared. The accuracy of 97.8% is been obtained by using SVM classifier when compared to KNN classifier. This approach does not require any human interaction for lesion detection. Thus, the improved toboggan algorithm can achieve precise lung lesion segmentation in CT images. The features extracted also helps to classify the lesion region of lungs efficiently