Biometric Authentication System on Mobile Personal Devices

We propose a secure, robust, and low-cost biometric authentication system on the mobile personal device for the personal network. The system consists of the following five key modules: 1) face detection; 2) face registration; 3) illumination normalization; 4) face verification; and 5) information fusion. For the complicated face authentication task on the devices with limited resources, the emphasis is largely on the reliability and applicability of the system. Both theoretical and practical considerations are taken. The final system is able to achieve an equal error rate of 2% under challenging testing protocols. The low hardware and software cost makes the system well adaptable to a large range of security applications

Facial Action Recognition Combining Heterogeneous Features via Multi-Kernel Learning

International audienceThis paper presents our response to the first interna- tional challenge on Facial Emotion Recognition and Analysis. We propose to combine different types of features to automatically detect Action Units in facial images. We use one multi-kernel SVM for each Action Unit we want to detect. The first kernel matrix is computed using Local Gabor Binary Pattern histograms and a histogram intersection kernel. The second kernel matrix is computed from AAM coefficients and an RBF kernel. During the training step, we combine these two types of features using the recently proposed SimpleMKL algorithm. SVM outputs are then averaged to exploit temporal information in the sequence. To eval- uate our system, we perform deep experimentations on several key issues: influence of features and kernel function in histogram- based SVM approaches, influence of spatially-independent in- formation versus geometric local appearance information and benefits of combining both, sensitivity to training data and interest of temporal context adaptation. We also compare our results to those of the other participants and try to explain why our method had the best performance during the FERA challenge

Motion clouds: model-based stimulus synthesis of natural-like random textures for the study of motion perception

Choosing an appropriate set of stimuli is essential to characterize the response of a sensory system to a particular functional dimension, such as the eye movement following the motion of a visual scene. Here, we describe a framework to generate random texture movies with controlled information content, i.e., Motion Clouds. These stimuli are defined using a generative model that is based on controlled experimental parametrization. We show that Motion Clouds correspond to dense mixing of localized moving gratings with random positions. Their global envelope is similar to natural-like stimulation with an approximate full-field translation corresponding to a retinal slip. We describe the construction of these stimuli mathematically and propose an open-source Python-based implementation. Examples of the use of this framework are shown. We also propose extensions to other modalities such as color vision, touch, and audition