Co-operative surveillance cameras for high quality face acquisition in a real-time door monitoring system

A poster session on co-operative surveillance cameras for high quality face acquisition in a real-time door monitoring syste

Pattern mining approaches used in sensor-based biometric recognition: a review

Sensing technologies place significant interest in the use of biometrics for the recognition and assessment of individuals. Pattern mining techniques have established a critical step in the progress of sensor-based biometric systems that are capable of perceiving, recognizing and computing sensor data, being a technology that searches for the high-level information about pattern recognition from low-level sensor readings in order to construct an artificial substitute for human recognition. The design of a successful sensor-based biometric recognition system needs to pay attention to the different issues involved in processing variable data being - acquisition of biometric data from a sensor, data pre-processing, feature extraction, recognition and/or classification, clustering and validation. A significant number of approaches from image processing, pattern identification and machine learning have been used to process sensor data. This paper aims to deliver a state-of-the-art summary and present strategies for utilizing the broadly utilized pattern mining methods in order to identify the challenges as well as future research directions of sensor-based biometric systems

Neighborhood Defined Feature Selection Strategy for Improved Face Recognition in Different Sensor Modalitie

A novel feature selection strategy for improved face recognition in images with variations due to illumination conditions, facial expressions, and partial occlusions is presented in this dissertation. A hybrid face recognition system that uses feature maps of phase congruency and modular kernel spaces is developed. Phase congruency provides a measure that is independent of the overall magnitude of a signal, making it invariant to variations in image illumination and contrast. A novel modular kernel spaces approach is developed and implemented on the phase congruency feature maps. Smaller sub-regions from a predefined neighborhood within the phase congruency images of the training samples are merged to obtain a large set of features. These features are then projected into higher dimensional spaces using kernel methods. The unique modularization procedure developed in this research takes into consideration that the facial variations in a real world scenario are confined to local regions. The additional pixel dependencies that are considered based on their importance help in providing additional information for classification. This procedure also helps in robust localization of the variations, further improving classification accuracy. The effectiveness of the new feature selection strategy has been demonstrated by employing it in two specific applications via face authentication in low resolution cameras and face recognition using multiple sensors (visible and infrared). The face authentication system uses low quality images captured by a web camera. The optical sensor of the web camera is very sensitive to environmental illumination variations. It is observed that the feature selection policy overcomes the facial and environmental variations. A methodology based on multiple training images and clustering is also incorporated to overcome the additional challenges of computational efficiency and the subject\u27s non involvement. A multi-sensor image fusion based face recognition methodology that uses the proposed feature selection technique is presented in this dissertation. Research studies have indicated that complementary information from different sensors helps in improving the recognition accuracy compared to individual modalities. A decision level fusion methodology is also developed which provides better performance compared to individual as well as data level fusion modalities. The new decision level fusion technique is also robust to registration discrepancies, which is a very important factor in operational scenarios. Research work is progressing to use the new face recognition technique in multi-view images by employing independent systems for separate views and integrating the results with an appropriate voting procedure

Recognizing Faces -- An Approach Based on Gabor Wavelets

As a hot research topic over the last 25 years, face recognition still seems to be a difficult and largely problem. Distortions caused by variations in illumination, expression and pose are the main challenges to be dealt with by researchers in this field. Efficient recognition algorithms, robust against such distortions, are the main motivations of this research. Based on a detailed review on the background and wide applications of Gabor wavelet, this powerful and biologically driven mathematical tool is adopted to extract features for face recognition. The features contain important local frequency information and have been proven to be robust against commonly encountered distortions. To reduce the computation and memory cost caused by the large feature dimension, a novel boosting based algorithm is proposed and successfully applied to eliminate redundant features. The selected features are further enhanced by kernel subspace methods to handle the nonlinear face variations. The efficiency and robustness of the proposed algorithm is extensively tested using the ORL, FERET and BANCA databases. To normalize the scale and orientation of face images, a generalized symmetry measure based algorithm is proposed for automatic eye location. Without the requirement of a training process, the method is simple, fast and fully tested using thousands of images from the BioID and BANCA databases. An automatic user identification system, consisting of detection, recognition and user management modules, has been developed. The system can effectively detect faces from real video streams, identify them and retrieve corresponding user information from the application database. Different detection and recognition algorithms can also be easily integrated into the framework