Data Uncertainty Guided Noise-aware Preprocessing Of Fingerprints

The effectiveness of fingerprint-based authentication systems on good quality fingerprints is established long back. However, the performance of standard fingerprint matching systems on noisy and poor quality fingerprints is far from satisfactory. Towards this, we propose a data uncertainty-based framework which enables the state-of-the-art fingerprint preprocessing models to quantify noise present in the input image and identify fingerprint regions with background noise and poor ridge clarity. Quantification of noise helps the model two folds: firstly, it makes the objective function adaptive to the noise in a particular input fingerprint and consequently, helps to achieve robust performance on noisy and distorted fingerprint regions. Secondly, it provides a noise variance map which indicates noisy pixels in the input fingerprint image. The predicted noise variance map enables the end-users to understand erroneous predictions due to noise present in the input image. Extensive experimental evaluation on 13 publicly available fingerprint databases, across different architectural choices and two fingerprint processing tasks demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed framework.Comment: IJCNN 2021 (Accepted

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

Two-Level Evaluation on Sensor Interoperability of Features in Fingerprint Image Segmentation

Features used in fingerprint segmentation significantly affect the segmentation performance. Various features exhibit different discriminating abilities on fingerprint images derived from different sensors. One feature which has better discriminating ability on images derived from a certain sensor may not adapt to segment images derived from other sensors. This degrades the segmentation performance. This paper empirically analyzes the sensor interoperability problem of segmentation feature, which refers to the feature’s ability to adapt to the raw fingerprints captured by different sensors. To address this issue, this paper presents a two-level feature evaluation method, including the first level feature evaluation based on segmentation error rate and the second level feature evaluation based on decision tree. The proposed method is performed on a number of fingerprint databases which are obtained from various sensors. Experimental results show that the proposed method can effectively evaluate the sensor interoperability of features, and the features with good evaluation results acquire better segmentation accuracies of images originating from different sensors

Sensor-invariant Fingerprint ROI Segmentation Using Recurrent Adversarial Learning

A fingerprint region of interest (roi) segmentation algorithm is designed to separate the foreground fingerprint from the background noise. All the learning based state-of-the-art fingerprint roi segmentation algorithms proposed in the literature are benchmarked on scenarios when both training and testing databases consist of fingerprint images acquired from the same sensors. However, when testing is conducted on a different sensor, the segmentation performance obtained is often unsatisfactory. As a result, every time a new fingerprint sensor is used for testing, the fingerprint roi segmentation model needs to be re-trained with the fingerprint image acquired from the new sensor and its corresponding manually marked ROI. Manually marking fingerprint ROI is expensive because firstly, it is time consuming and more importantly, requires domain expertise. In order to save the human effort in generating annotations required by state-of-the-art, we propose a fingerprint roi segmentation model which aligns the features of fingerprint images derived from the unseen sensor such that they are similar to the ones obtained from the fingerprints whose ground truth roi masks are available for training. Specifically, we propose a recurrent adversarial learning based feature alignment network that helps the fingerprint roi segmentation model to learn sensor-invariant features. Consequently, sensor-invariant features learnt by the proposed roi segmentation model help it to achieve improved segmentation performance on fingerprints acquired from the new sensor. Experiments on publicly available FVC databases demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed work.Comment: IJCNN 2021 (Accepted

Biometrics

Biometrics uses methods for unique recognition of humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical or behavioral traits. In computer science, particularly, biometrics is used as a form of identity access management and access control. It is also used to identify individuals in groups that are under surveillance. The book consists of 13 chapters, each focusing on a certain aspect of the problem. The book chapters are divided into three sections: physical biometrics, behavioral biometrics and medical biometrics. The key objective of the book is to provide comprehensive reference and text on human authentication and people identity verification from both physiological, behavioural and other points of view. It aims to publish new insights into current innovations in computer systems and technology for biometrics development and its applications. The book was reviewed by the editor Dr. Jucheng Yang, and many of the guest editors, such as Dr. Girija Chetty, Dr. Norman Poh, Dr. Loris Nanni, Dr. Jianjiang Feng, Dr. Dongsun Park, Dr. Sook Yoon and so on, who also made a significant contribution to the book

Machine vision detection of crop diseases

The production of agricultural crops such as wheat is a multi-billion dollar industry. Each year, diseases such as fungal infections can potentially destroy the entire production in a region if the conditions are right. Traditional mitigation has involved the grower's own judgement as the first option, followed by use of trained professionals for confirmation of diagnosis and advice. Often the onset of infection is rapid, and the professionals may not always be available to assess the situation before the infection spreads. This reliance on individual judgement and off-site experts highlights a need to develop a reliable, automated software solution which can provide an accurate and immediate software diagnosis at the first sign of infection. This research has developed into two solutions: a system to help agronomists by using professional camera equipment, as well as the outline for a mobile solution which can operate on a `smart' device to provide growers with an on-hand diagnosis tool. By investigating the way the human mind and eye works, a software emulation of the human visual system was constructed, with artificial intelligence approaches used for final interpretation of the optical response. This use of artificial intelligence has allowed for the design of a robust system which can `self-learn' to recognise any new disease samples. Research involved investigation of a number of camera and hardware options. Final system validation was conducted on both `stock' disease images provided by agronomists, and on actual plant samples, which proved that the system could function across a broad range of diseases and crops with a degree of accuracy between 95-99%. This research indicates that it is possible to develop tools which can give an immediate analysis at all stages of infection, and be robust enough to work over a range of diseases and crops. Further development and refinement would provide a useful diagnosis tool for both growers and experts

Biometric Systems

Because of the accelerating progress in biometrics research and the latest nation-state threats to security, this book's publication is not only timely but also much needed. This volume contains seventeen peer-reviewed chapters reporting the state of the art in biometrics research: security issues, signature verification, fingerprint identification, wrist vascular biometrics, ear detection, face detection and identification (including a new survey of face recognition), person re-identification, electrocardiogram (ECT) recognition, and several multi-modal systems. This book will be a valuable resource for graduate students, engineers, and researchers interested in understanding and investigating this important field of study