A single scale retinex based method for palm vein extraction

Palm vein recognition is a novel biometric identification technology. But how to gain a better vein extraction result from the raw palm image is still a challenging problem, especially when the raw data collection has the problem of asymmetric illumination. This paper proposes a method based on single scale Retinex algorithm to extract palm vein image when strong shadow presents due to asymmetric illumination and uneven geometry of the palm. We test our method on a multispectral palm image. The experimental result shows that the proposed method is robust to the influence of illumination angle and shadow. Compared to the traditional extraction methods, the proposed method can obtain palm vein lines with better visualization performance (the contrast ratio increases by 18.4%, entropy increases by 1.07%, and definition increases by 18.8%)

Improved methods for finger vein identification using composite median-wiener filter and hierarchical centroid features extraction

Finger vein identification is a potential new area in biometric systems. Finger vein patterns contain highly discriminative characteristics, which are difficult to be forged because they reside underneath the skin of the finger and require a specific device to capture them. Research have been carried out in this field but there is still an unresolved issue related to low-quality data due to data capturing and processing. Low-quality data have caused errors in the feature extraction process and reduced identification performance rate in finger vein identification. To address this issue, a new image enhancement and feature extraction methods were developed to improve finger vein identification. The image enhancement, Composite Median-Wiener (CMW) filter would improve image quality and preserve the edges of the finger vein image. Next, the feature extraction method, Hierarchical Centroid Feature Method (HCM) was fused with statistical pixel-based distribution feature method at the feature-level fusion to improve the performance of finger vein identification. These methods were evaluated on public SDUMLA-HMT and FV-USM finger vein databases. Each database was divided into training and testing sets. The average result of the experiments conducted was taken to ensure the accuracy of the measurements. The k-Nearest Neighbor classifier with city block distance to match the features was implemented. Both these methods produced accuracy as high as 97.64% for identification rate and 1.11% of equal error rate (EER) for measures verification rate. These showed that the accuracy of the proposed finger vein identification method is higher than the one reported in the literature. As a conclusion, the results have proven that the CMW filter and HCM have significantly improved the accuracy of finger vein identification

Dorsal hand vein image enhancement using fusion of clahe and fuzzy adaptive gamma

Enhancement of captured hand vein images is essential for a number of purposes, such as accurate biometric identification and ease of medical intravenous access. This paper presents an improved hand vein image enhancement technique based on weighted average fusion of contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) and fuzzy adaptive gamma (FAG). The proposed technique is applied using three stages. Firstly, grey level intensities with CLAHE are locally applied to image pixels for contrast enhancement. Secondly, the grey level intensities are then globally transformed into membership planes and modified with FAG operator for the same purposes. Finally, the resultant images from CLAHE and FAG are fused using improved weighted averaging methods for clearer vein patterns. Then, matched filter with first-order derivative Gaussian (MF-FODG) is employed to segment vein patterns. The proposed technique was tested on self-acquired dorsal hand vein images as well as images from the SUAS databases. The performance of the proposed technique is compared with various other image enhancement techniques based on mean square error (MSE), peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and structural similarity index measurement (SSIM). The proposed enhancement technique’s impact on the segmentation process has also been evaluated using sensitivity, accuracy, and dice coefficient. The experimental results show that the proposed enhancement technique can significantly enhance the hand vein patterns and improve the detection of dorsal hand veins

Handbook of Vascular Biometrics

This open access handbook provides the first comprehensive overview of biometrics exploiting the shape of human blood vessels for biometric recognition, i.e. vascular biometrics, including finger vein recognition, hand/palm vein recognition, retina recognition, and sclera recognition. After an introductory chapter summarizing the state of the art in and availability of commercial systems and open datasets/open source software, individual chapters focus on specific aspects of one of the biometric modalities, including questions of usability, security, and privacy. The book features contributions from both academia and major industrial manufacturers

Liveness Detection on Fingers Using Vein Pattern

Tato práce se zabývá rozšířením snímače otisků prstů Touchless Biometric Systems 3D-Enroll o jednotku detekce živosti prstu na základě žil. Bylo navrhnuto a zkonstruováno hardwarové řešení s využitím infračervených diod. Navržené softwarové řešení pracuje ve dvou různých režimech: detekce živosti na základě texturních příznaků a verifikace uživatelů na základě porovnávání žilních vzorů. Datový soubor obsahující přes 1100 snímků jak živých prstů tak jejich falsifikátů vznikl jako součást této práce a výkonnost obou zmíněných režimů byla vyhodnocena na tomto datovém souboru. Na závěr byly navrhnuty materiály vhodné k výrobě falsifikátů otisků prstů umožňující oklamání detekce živosti pomocí žilních vzorů.This work presents liveness detection extension of the Touchless Biometric Systems 3D-Enroll fingerprint sensor which is based on finger vein pattern. Hardware solution was designed and realized using infrared diodes. Designed software system operates in two different modes: liveness detection based on texture features and user verification using finger vein matching. A dataset containing more than 1,100 images of both real fingers and their falsifications was gathered. Performance of both proposed modes was evaluated using mentioned dataset and suitable materials, that can fool the liveness detection module, were highlighted.

Face Liveness Detection under Processed Image Attacks

Face recognition is a mature and reliable technology for identifying people. Due to high-definition cameras and supporting devices, it is considered the fastest and the least intrusive biometric recognition modality. Nevertheless, effective spoofing attempts on face recognition systems were found to be possible. As a result, various anti-spoofing algorithms were developed to counteract these attacks. They are commonly referred in the literature a liveness detection tests. In this research we highlight the effectiveness of some simple, direct spoofing attacks, and test one of the current robust liveness detection algorithms, i.e. the logistic regression based face liveness detection from a single image, proposed by the Tan et al. in 2010, against malicious attacks using processed imposter images. In particular, we study experimentally the effect of common image processing operations such as sharpening and smoothing, as well as corruption with salt and pepper noise, on the face liveness detection algorithm, and we find that it is especially vulnerable against spoofing attempts using processed imposter images. We design and present a new facial database, the Durham Face Database, which is the first, to the best of our knowledge, to have client, imposter as well as processed imposter images. Finally, we evaluate our claim on the effectiveness of proposed imposter image attacks using transfer learning on Convolutional Neural Networks. We verify that such attacks are more difficult to detect even when using high-end, expensive machine learning techniques

Machine Learning Methods for Human Identification from Dorsal Hand Images

Person identification is a process that uniquely identifies an individual based on physical or behavioural traits. This study investigates methods for the analysis of images of the human hand, focusing on their uniqueness and potential use for human identification. The human hand has significant and distinctive characteristics, and is highly complex and interesting, yet it has not been explored in much detail, particularly in the context of the contemporary high level of digitalisation and, more specifically, the advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and computer vision (CV). This research area is highly multi-disciplinary, involving anatomists, anthropologists, bioinformaticians, image analysts and, increasingly, computer scientists. A growing pool of advanced methods based on AI, ML and CV can benefit and relate directly to a better representation of the human hand in computer analysis. Historically, the research methods in this area relied on ‘handcrafted’ features such as the local binary pattern (LBP) and histogram of gradient (HOG) extraction, which necessitated human intervention. However, such approaches struggle to encode the human hand in variable conditions effectively, because of the change in camera viewpoint, hand pose, rotation, image quality, and self-occlusion. Thus, their performance is limited. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in deep learning neural network (DLNN) approaches, specifically convolutional neural networks (CNNs), due to the highly accurate results achieved in many applications and the wide availability of images. This work investigates advanced methods based on ML and DLNN for segmenting hand images with various rotation changes into different patches (e.g., knuckles and fingernails). The thesis focuses on developing ML methods like pre-trained CNN models on the 'ImageNet' dataset to learn the underlying structure of the human hand by extracting robust features from hand images with diverse conditions of rotation, and image quality. Also, this study investigates fine-tuning the pre-trained models of DLNN on subsets of hand images, as well as using various similarity metrics to find the best match of the individual’s hand. Furthermore, this work explores different types of ensemble learning or fusions, those of different region and similarity metrics to improve human identification results. This thesis also presents a study of a Siamese network on sub-images or segments of human dorsal hands for identification tasks. All presented approaches are compared with the state-of-the-art methods. This study advances the understanding of variations in and the uniqueness of humans using patches of their hands (e.g., different types of knuckles and fingernails). Lastly, it compares the matching performances of the left- and right-hand patches using various hand datasets and investigates whether the fingernail produces better identification results than the knuckles. This research shows that the proposed framework for person identification based on hand components led to better person identification results. The framework consists of vital feature extractions based on deep learning neural network (DLNN) and similarity metrics. These elements enhanced the performance. Also, the fingernails' shape performed better than other hand components, including the base, major, and minor knuckles. The left hand can be more distinguishable to individuals than the right hand. The fine-tuning of the hand components and ensemble learning improved the identification results

FedBiometric: Image Features Based Biometric Presentation Attack Detection Using Hybrid CNNs-SVM in Federated Learning

In the past few years, biometric identification systems have become popular for personal, national, and global security. In addition to other biometric modalities, facial and fingerprint recognition have gained popularity due to their uniqueness, stability, convenience, and cost-effectiveness compared to other biometric modalities. However, the evolution of fake biometrics, such as printed materials, 2D or 3D faces, makeup, and cosmetics, has brought new challenges. As a result of these modifications, several facial and fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection methods have been proposed to distinguish between live and spoof faces or fingerprints. Federated learning can play a significant role in this problem due to its distributed learning setting and privacy-preserving advantages. This work proposes a hybrid ResNet50-SVM based federated learning model for facial Presentation Attack Detection utilizing Local Binary Pattern (LBP), or Gabor filter-based extracted image features. For fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection (PAD), this work proposes a hybrid CNN-SVM based federated learning model utilizing Local Binary Pattern (LBP), or Histograms of Oriented Gradient (HOG)-based extracted image features

Skin texture features for face recognition

Face recognition has been deployed in a wide range of important applications including surveillance and forensic identification. However, it still seems to be a challenging problem as its performance severely degrades under illumination, pose and expression variations, as well as with occlusions, and aging. In this thesis, we have investigated the use of local facial skin data as a source of biometric information to improve human recognition. Skin texture features have been exploited in three major tasks, which include (i) improving the performance of conventional face recognition systems, (ii) building an adaptive skin-based face recognition system, and (iii) dealing with circumstances when a full view of the face may not be avai'lable. Additionally, a fully automated scheme is presented for localizing eyes and mouth and segmenting four facial regions: forehead, right cheek, left cheek and chin. These four regions are divided into nonoverlapping patches with equal size. A novel skin/non-skin classifier is proposed for detecting patches containing only skin texture and therefore detecting the pure-skin regions. Experiments using the XM2VTS database indicate that the forehead region has the most significant biometric information. The use of forehead texture features improves the rank-l identification of Eigenfaces system from 77.63% to 84.07%. The rank-l identification is equal 93.56% when this region is fused with Kernel Direct Discriminant Analysis algorithm