Combining 3D and 2D for less constrained periocular recognition

Periocular recognition has recently become an active topic in biometrics. Typically it uses 2D image data of the periocular region. This paper is the first description of combining 3D shape structure with 2D texture. A simple and effective technique using iterative closest point (ICP) was applied for 3D periocular region matching. It proved its strength for relatively unconstrained eye region capture, and does not require any training. Local binary patterns (LBP) were applied for 2D image based periocular matching. The two modalities were combined at the score-level. This approach was evaluated using the Bosphorus 3D face database, which contains large variations in facial expressions, head poses and occlusions. The rank-1 accuracy achieved from the 3D data (80%) was better than that for 2D (58%), and the best accuracy (83%) was achieved by fusing the two types of data. This suggests that significant improvements to periocular recognition systems could be achieved using the 3D structure information that is now available from small and inexpensive sensors

Periocular Biometrics: A Modality for Unconstrained Scenarios

Periocular refers to the region of the face that surrounds the eye socket. This is a feature-rich area that can be used by itself to determine the identity of an individual. It is especially useful when the iris or the face cannot be reliably acquired. This can be the case of unconstrained or uncooperative scenarios, where the face may appear partially occluded, or the subject-to-camera distance may be high. However, it has received revived attention during the pandemic due to masked faces, leaving the ocular region as the only visible facial area, even in controlled scenarios. This paper discusses the state-of-the-art of periocular biometrics, giving an overall framework of its most significant research aspects

Log-Likelihood Score Level Fusion for Improved Cross-Sensor Smartphone Periocular Recognition

The proliferation of cameras and personal devices results in a wide variability of imaging conditions, producing large intra-class variations and a significant performance drop when images from heterogeneous environments are compared. However, many applications require to deal with data from different sources regularly, thus needing to overcome these interoperability problems. Here, we employ fusion of several comparators to improve periocular performance when images from different smartphones are compared. We use a probabilistic fusion framework based on linear logistic regression, in which fused scores tend to be log-likelihood ratios, obtaining a reduction in cross-sensor EER of up to 40% due to the fusion. Our framework also provides an elegant and simple solution to handle signals from different devices, since same-sensor and cross-sensor score distributions are aligned and mapped to a common probabilistic domain. This allows the use of Bayes thresholds for optimal decision-making, eliminating the need of sensor-specific thresholds, which is essential in operational conditions because the threshold setting critically determines the accuracy of the authentication process in many applications.Comment: Published at Proc. 25th European Signal Processing Conference, EUSIPCO 2017. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1902.0812