One-Class Classification: Taxonomy of Study and Review of Techniques

One-class classification (OCC) algorithms aim to build classification models when the negative class is either absent, poorly sampled or not well defined. This unique situation constrains the learning of efficient classifiers by defining class boundary just with the knowledge of positive class. The OCC problem has been considered and applied under many research themes, such as outlier/novelty detection and concept learning. In this paper we present a unified view of the general problem of OCC by presenting a taxonomy of study for OCC problems, which is based on the availability of training data, algorithms used and the application domains applied. We further delve into each of the categories of the proposed taxonomy and present a comprehensive literature review of the OCC algorithms, techniques and methodologies with a focus on their significance, limitations and applications. We conclude our paper by discussing some open research problems in the field of OCC and present our vision for future research.Comment: 24 pages + 11 pages of references, 8 figure

Multimodal biometrics score level fusion using non-confidence information

Multimodal biometrics refers to automatic authentication methods that depend on multiple modalities of measurable physical characteristics. It alleviates most of the restrictions of single biometrics. To combine the multimodal biometrics scores, three different categories of fusion approaches including rule based, classification based and density based approaches are available. When choosing an approach, one has to consider not only the fusion performance, but also system requirements and other circumstances. In the context of verification, classification errors arise from samples in the overlapping region (or non- confidence region) between genuine users and impostors. In score space, a further separation of the samples outside the non-confidence region does not result in further verification improvements. Therefore, information contained in the non-confidence region might be useful for improving the fusion process. Up to this point, no attempts are reported in the literature that tries to enhance the fusion process using this additional information. In this work, the use of this information is explored in rule based and density based approaches mentioned above

Performance analysis of multimodal biometric fusion

Biometrics is constantly evolving technology which has been widely used in many official and commercial identification applications. In fact in recent years biometric-based authentication techniques received more attention due to increased concerns in security. Most biometric systems that are currently in use typically employ a single biometric trait. Such systems are called unibiometric systems. Despite considerable advances in recent years, there are still challenges in authentication based on a single biometric trait, such as noisy data, restricted degree of freedom, intra-class variability, non-universality, spoof attack and unacceptable error rates. Some of the challenges can be handled by designing a multimodal biometric system. Multimodal biometric systems are those which utilize or are capable of utilizing, more than one physiological or behavioural characteristic for enrolment, verification, or identification. In this thesis, we propose a novel fusion approach at a hybrid level between iris and online signature traits. Online signature and iris authentication techniques have been employed in a range of biometric applications. Besides improving the accuracy, the fusion of both of the biometrics has several advantages such as increasing population coverage, deterring spoofing activities and reducing enrolment failure. In this doctoral dissertation, we make a first attempt to combine online signature and iris biometrics. We principally explore the fusion of iris and online signature biometrics and their potential application as biometric identifiers. To address this issue, investigations is carried out into the relative performance of several statistical data fusion techniques for integrating the information in both unimodal and multimodal biometrics. We compare the results of the multimodal approach with the results of the individual online signature and iris authentication approaches. This dissertation describes research into the feature and decision fusion levels in multimodal biometrics.State of Kuwait – The Public Authority of Applied Education and Trainin

One-class Classification: An Approach to Handle Class Imbalance in Multimodal Biometric Authentication

Biometric verification is the process of authenticating a person‟s identity using his/her physiological and behavioural characteristics. It is well-known that multimodal biometric systems can further improve the authentication accuracy by combining information from multiple biometric traits at various levels, namely sensor, feature, match score and decision levels. Fusion at match score level is generally preferred due to the trade-off between information availability and fusion complexity. However, combining match scores poses a number of challenges, when treated as a two-class classification problem due to the highly imbalanced class distributions. Most conventional classifiers assume equally balanced classes. They do not work well when samples of one class vastly outnumber the samples of the other class. These challenges become even more significant, when the fusion is based on user-specific processing due to the limited availability of the genuine samples per user. This thesis aims at exploring the paradigm of one-class classification to advance the classification performance of imbalanced biometric data sets. The contributions of the research can be enumerated as follows. Firstly, a thorough investigation of the various one-class classifiers, including Gaussian Mixture Model, k-Nearest Neighbour, K-means clustering and Support Vector Data Description, has been provided. These classifiers are applied in learning the user-specific and user-independent descriptions for the biometric decision inference. It is demonstrated that the one-class classifiers are particularly useful in handling the imbalanced learning problem in multimodal biometric authentication. User-specific approach is a better alternative with respect to user-independent counterpart because it is able to overcome the so-called within-class sub-concepts problem, which arises very often in multimodal biometric systems due to the existence of user variation. Secondly, a novel adapted score fusion scheme that consists of one-class classifiers and is trained using both the genuine user and impostor samples has been proposed. This method also replaces user-independent by user-specific description to learn the characteristics of the impostor class, and thus, reducing the degree of imbalanced proportion of data for different classes. Extensive experiments are conducted on the BioSecure DS2 and XM2VTS databases to illustrate the potential of the proposed adapted score fusion scheme, which provides a relative improvement in terms of Equal Error Rate of 32% and 20% as compared to the standard sum of scores and likelihood ratio based score fusion, respectively. Thirdly, a hybrid boosting algorithm, called r-ABOC has been developed, which is capable of exploiting the natural capabilities of both the well-known Real AdaBoost and one-class classification to further improve the system performance without causing overfitting. However, unlike the conventional Real AdaBoost, the individual classifiers in the proposed schema are trained on the same data set, but with different parameter choices. This does not only generate a high diversity, which is vital to the success of r-ABOC, but also reduces the number of user-specified parameters. A comprehensive empirical study using the BioSecure DS2 and XM2VTS databases demonstrates that r-ABOC may achieve a performance gain in terms of Half Total Error Rate of up to 28% with respect to other state-of-the-art biometric score fusion techniques. Finally, a Robust Imputation based on Group Method of Data Handling (RIBG) has been proposed to handle the missing data problem in the BioSecure DS2 database. RIBG is able to provide accurate predictions of incomplete score vectors. It is observed to achieve a better performance with respect to the state-of-the-art imputation techniques, including mean, median and k-NN imputations. An important feature of RIBG is that it does not require any parameter fine-tuning, and hence, is amendable to immediate applications