Biometric Systems

Biometric authentication has been widely used for access control and security systems over the past few years. The purpose of this book is to provide the readers with life cycle of different biometric authentication systems from their design and development to qualification and final application. The major systems discussed in this book include fingerprint identification, face recognition, iris segmentation and classification, signature verification and other miscellaneous systems which describe management policies of biometrics, reliability measures, pressure based typing and signature verification, bio-chemical systems and behavioral characteristics. In summary, this book provides the students and the researchers with different approaches to develop biometric authentication systems and at the same time includes state-of-the-art approaches in their design and development. The approaches have been thoroughly tested on standard databases and in real world applications

Modeling Errors in Biometric Surveillance and De-duplication Systems

In biometrics-based surveillance and de-duplication applications, the system commonly determines if a given individual has been encountered before. In this dissertation, these applications are viewed as specific instances of a broader class of problems known as Anonymous Identification. Here, the system does not necessarily determine the identity of a person; rather, it merely establishes if the given input biometric data was encountered previously. This dissertation demonstrates that traditional biometric evaluation measures cannot adequately estimate the error rate of an anonymous identification system in general and a de-duplication system in particular. In this regard, the first contribution is the design of an error prediction model for an anonymous identification system. The model shows that the order in which individuals are encountered impacts the error rate of the system. The second contribution - in the context of an identification system in general - is an explanatory model that explains the relationship between the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve and the Cumulative Match Characteristic (CMC) curve of a closed-set biometric system. The phenomenon of biometrics menagerie is used to explain the possibility of deducing multiple CMC curves from the same ROC curve. Consequently, it is shown that a good\u27\u27 verification system can be a poor\u27\u27 identification system and vice-versa.;Besides the aforementioned contributions, the dissertation also explores the use of gait as a biometric modality in surveillance systems operating in the thermal or shortwave infrared (SWIR) spectrum. In this regard, a new gait representation scheme known as Gait Curves is developed and evaluated on thermal and SWIR data. Finally, a clustering scheme is used to demonstrate that gait patterns can be clustered into multiple categories; further, specific physical traits related to gender and body area are observed to impact cluster generation.;In sum, the dissertation provides some new insights into modeling anonymous identification systems and gait patterns for biometrics-based surveillance systems

Indexing techniques for fingerprint and iris databases

This thesis addresses the problem of biometric indexing in the context of fingerprint and iris databases. In large scale authentication system, the goal is to determine the identity of a subject from a large set of identities. Indexing is a technique to reduce the number of candidate identities to be considered by the identification algorithm. The fingerprint indexing technique (for closed set identification) proposed in this thesis is based on a combination of minutiae and ridge features. Experiments conducted on the FVC2002 and FVC2004 databases indicate that the inclusion of ridge features aids in enhancing indexing performance. The thesis also proposes three techniques for iris indexing (for closed set identification). The first technique is based on iriscodes. The second technique utilizes local binary patterns in the iris texture. The third technique analyzes the iris texture based on a pixel-level difference histogram. The ability to perform indexing at the texture level avoids the computational complexity involved in encoding and is, therefore, more attractive for iris indexing. Experiments on the CASIA 3.0 database suggest the potential of these schemes to index large-scale iris databases

On the Performance Improvement of Iris Biometric System

Iris is an established biometric modality with many practical applications. Its performance is influenced by noise, database size, and feature representation. This thesis focusses on mitigating these challenges by efficiently characterising iris texture,developing multi-unit iris recognition, reducing the search space of large iris databases, and investigating if iris pattern change over time.To suitably characterise texture features of iris, Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is combined with Fourier transform to develop a keypoint descriptor-F-SIFT. Proposed F-SIFT is invariant to transformation, illumination, and occlusion along with strong texture description property. For pairing the keypoints from gallery and probe iris images, Phase-Only Correlation (POC) function is used. The use of phase information reduces the wrong matches generated using SIFT. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of F-SIFT over existing keypoint descriptors.To perform the multi-unit iris fusion, a novel classifier is proposed known as Incremental Granular Relevance Vector Machine (iGRVM) that incorporates incremental and granular learning into RVM. The proposed classifier by design is scalable and unbiased which is particularly suitable for biometrics. The match scores from individual units of iris are passed as an input to the corresponding iGRVM classifier, and the posterior probabilities are combined using weighted sum rule. Experimentally, it is shown that the performance of multi-unit iris recognition improves over single unit iris. For search space reduction, local feature based indexing approaches are developed using multi-dimensional trees. Such features extracted from annular iris images are used to index the database using k-d tree. To handle the scalability issue of k-d tree, k-d-b tree based indexing approach is proposed. Another indexing approach using R-tree is developed to minimise the indexing errors. For retrieval, hybrid coarse-to-fine search strategy is proposed. It is inferred from the results that unification of hybrid search with R-tree significantly improves the identification performance. Iris is assumed to be stable over time. Recently, researchers have reported that false rejections increase over the period of time which in turn degrades the performance. An empirical investigation has been made on standard iris aging databases to find whether iris patterns change over time. From the results, it is found that the rejections are primarily due to the presence of other covariates such as blur, noise, occlusion, pupil dilation, and not due to agin

Methods for iris classification and macro feature detection

This work deals with two distinct aspects of iris-based biometric systems: iris classification and macro-feature detection. Iris classification will benefit identification systems where the query image has to be compared against all identities in the database. By preclassifying the query image based on its texture, this comparison is executed only against those irises that are from the same class as the query image. In the proposed classification method, the normalized iris is tessellated into overlapping rectangular blocks and textural features are extracted from each block. A clustering scheme is used to generate multiple classes of irises based on the extracted features. A minimum distance classifier is then used to assign the query iris to a particular class. The use of multiple blocks with decision level fusion in the classification process is observed to enhance the accuracy of the method.;Most iris-based systems use the global and local texture information of the iris to perform matching. In order to exploit the anatomical structures within the iris during the matching stage, two methods to detect the macro-features of the iris in multi-spectral images are proposed. These macro-features typically correspond to anomalies in pigmentation and structure within the iris. The first method uses the edge-flow technique to localize these features. The second technique uses the SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) operator to detect discontinuities in the image. Preliminary results show that detection of these macro features is a difficult problem owing to the richness and variability in iris color and texture. Thus a large number of spurious features are detected by both the methods suggesting the need for designing more sophisticated algorithms. However the ability of the SIFT operator to match partial iris images is demonstrated thereby indicating the potential of this scheme to be used for macro-feature detection

DPD-DFF: a dual phase distributed scheme with double fingerprint fusion for fast and accurate identification in large databases

Nowadays, many companies and institutions need fast and reliable identification systems that are able to deal with very large databases. Fingerprints are among the most used biometric traits for identification. In the current literature there are fingerprint matching algorithms that are focused on efficiency, whilst others are based on accuracy. In this paper we propose a flexible dual phase identification method, called DPD-DFF, that combines two fingers and two matchers within a hybrid fusion scheme to obtain both fast and accurate results. Different alternatives are designed to find a trade-off between runtime and accuracy that can be further tuned with a single parameter. The experiments show that DPD-DFF obtains very competitive results in comparison with the state-of-the-art score fusion techniques, especially when dealing with large databases or impostor fingerprints

Pattern Recognition

Pattern recognition is a very wide research field. It involves factors as diverse as sensors, feature extraction, pattern classification, decision fusion, applications and others. The signals processed are commonly one, two or three dimensional, the processing is done in real- time or takes hours and days, some systems look for one narrow object class, others search huge databases for entries with at least a small amount of similarity. No single person can claim expertise across the whole field, which develops rapidly, updates its paradigms and comprehends several philosophical approaches. This book reflects this diversity by presenting a selection of recent developments within the area of pattern recognition and related fields. It covers theoretical advances in classification and feature extraction as well as application-oriented works. Authors of these 25 works present and advocate recent achievements of their research related to the field of pattern recognition

Iris Indexing and Ear Classification

To identify an individual using a biometric system, the input biometric data has to be typically compared against that of each and every identity in the existing database during the matching stage. The response time of the system increases with the increase in number of individuals (i.e., database size), which is not acceptable in real time monitoring or when working on large scale data. This thesis addresses the problem of reducing the number of database candidates to be considered during matching in the context of iris and ear recognition. In the case of iris, an indexing mechanism based on Burrows Wheeler Transform (BWT) is proposed. Experiments on the CASIA version 3 iris database show a significant reduction in both search time and search space, suggesting the potential of this scheme for indexing iris databases. The ear classification scheme proposed in the thesis is based on parameterizing the shape of the ear and assigning it to one of four classes: round, rectangle, oval and triangle. Experiments on the MAGNA database suggest the potential of this scheme for classifying ear databases