Quality-driven and real-time iris recognition from close-up eye videos

International audienceThis paper deals with the computation of robust iris templates from video sequences. The main contribution is to propose (i) optimal tracking and robust detection of the pupil, (ii) smart selection of iris images to be enrolled, and (iii) multi-thread and quality-driven decomposition of tasks to reach real-time processing. The evaluation of the system was done on the Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge dataset. Especially we conducted a systematic study regarding the fragile bit rate and the number of merged images, using classical criteria. We reached an equal error rate value of 0.2% which reflects high performance on this database with respect to previous studies

Knitting a Frame [16mm film]

The films ‘Knitting a Frame’ and ‘Knitting pattern no.1’, employ common systems of production to reflect issues of time and pattern, exploring analogies between artists’ film/animation and knitting. These films extend the notion that construction of the film/and or fabric can be reliant on programming, controls and human gestures outside of their respective conventions. In ‘Knitting a Frame’ a single frame animation method is used, the act of exposure is instigated by the knitter (themselves), who we see in the image. The wool, also seen, is looped from the knitter over the single frame release of the camera and back to the knitting; when a knitted stitch is made the wool is pulled taught and because of this a single frame exposure is made. The unit of construction, a ‘frame’, is also the product of the knitting, this knitted frame of fabric is held up to the camera signalling the completion of the object and the end of the film

Biometric Systems

Biometric authentication has been widely used for access control and security systems over the past few years. The purpose of this book is to provide the readers with life cycle of different biometric authentication systems from their design and development to qualification and final application. The major systems discussed in this book include fingerprint identification, face recognition, iris segmentation and classification, signature verification and other miscellaneous systems which describe management policies of biometrics, reliability measures, pressure based typing and signature verification, bio-chemical systems and behavioral characteristics. In summary, this book provides the students and the researchers with different approaches to develop biometric authentication systems and at the same time includes state-of-the-art approaches in their design and development. The approaches have been thoroughly tested on standard databases and in real world applications

Archaeology of the Moving Image (Volume 1, Summer 2022)

A compilation of postgraduate student research projects written between 2017 and 2021 for a module titled Archaeology of the Moving Image in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Archaeology of the Moving Image is a course that encourages students to undertake independent investigations of the relationship between the past, present and future of moving image culture

Screen Violence from Settler Colonialism to Cognitive Capitalism: Westworld and the Player Piano

While the HBO show Westworld (2016–present, created by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan) has gained much critical attention for its byzantine plotting and philosophical conundrums, the present discussion focuses instead on the basic premise on which the titular park operates, namely that the algorithms that govern human behavior can be disclosed by studying how human beings behave toward image beings. Under the guise of a tactile experience of a make-believe past, the park attractions clandestinely function as a large behavioral sensor, extracting actionable data from the guests who reveal their inner drives when interacting with the host environment. Taking its cue from the opening titles of the first season, the argument pivots on the master trope of the series: the machine-readable scroll of perforated paper that commands the automated performance of the player piano. This motif is examined through a double-pronged approach that aligns the anthropology of images developed by Hans Belting, which understands the relation between humans and images as the interactions between “hosts” and “guests,” with the archaeology of media and its dominant concern to uncover the prehistory of the automated control systems of the computer age. While Westworld proffers a timely allegory of biopolitical capture along the digital frontier, the show ultimately testifies to the failure to constructively engage with the precarious relation between hosts and guests that to an equal extent defines our contemporary moment. The initial problem raised by Westworld, the ethics of killing virtual beings, thus gives rise to a broader historical inquiry that concerns the inability of human societies to face the past and deal with the images they inherit

An investigation into achieving visual narration using photochromic dyes on a textile substrate

Photochromic dyes have the unique property of being colourless until exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light. Their application within design has thus far been basic, predominantly developing the medium as it is exposed to natural UV light. Therefore, by exploring the dyes’ colours and movement when printed on a textile substrate and developed by artificial UV light, this thesis investigates their ability to create a form of visual narrative. Using the dyes’ colours to evoke a change in emotion set the parameters for answering this aim. Testing the interactions of the dyes’ colours in sunlight, on a range of substrates and in varied combinations, provided initial knowledge of how they perform in this medium. Whilst the stylistic techniques of French Impressionist films provided configurations with which to explore the movement of the dyes, research on colour showed the diversity of ways in which it is able to be used to express emotion. Two custom built UV LED arrays, manually operated then software driven, enabled the dyes’ development times and intervals to be controlled. Design questions were then answered by combining these factors with the dyes’ fading speeds. Storyboarding photographs became an important part of the analysis and reflection process whilst filming also assisted in observing their transient nature. This work revealed that a new methodology, that was based on placement and sequencing, would be necessary when designing with dyes that move. Design exploration illustrated how using two dyes, from opposite ends of both the fading and emotional spectrum, mixed by printing, could create a colour change, as they faded, when they were developed in a linear sequence. Subsequently, by combining abstract representational imagery with variations on the stylistic film techniques, to alternately develop two dyes, it was illustrated how, by varying their development intervals, these dyes have the potential to create a visual narrative that evokes a change of emotion in the viewer

Keep Your Fingerprints to Yourself: New York Needs a Biometric Privacy Law

(Excerpt) Imagine walking into a store, picking something up, and just walking out. No longer is this shoplifting, it is legal. In 2016, Amazon introduced their “Just Walk Out” technology in Seattle. “Just Walk Out” uses cameras located throughout the store to monitor shoppers, document what they pick up, and automatically charge that shoppers’ Amazon account when they leave the store. Recently, Amazon started selling “Just Walk Out” technology to other retailers. Since then, retailers have become increasingly interested in collecting and using customers’ “biometric identifiers and information.” Generally, “biometrics” is used to refer to “measurable human biological and behavioral characteristics that can be used for identification, or the automated methods of recognizing an individual based on those characteristics.” With the COVID-19 pandemic resulting in more contactless payment, the commercial use of biometric identifiers and information has grown exponentially. As biometric technology is constantly evolving, so is its definition. Some examples of physical characteristics typically measured are: retina or iris scans, fingerprints, voiceprints, and scans or records of hand or face geometry. Behavioral characteristics can include handwriting samples and signatures, voice recognition, and keyboard stroke and typing habits. Data collected and recorded by measuring an individual’s biological characteristics are known as “biometric identifiers.” Data derived and conclusions drawn from these biometric identifiers are known as “biometric information.

Learning and Production of Movement Sequences: Behavioral, Neurophysiological, and Modeling Perspectives

A growing wave of behavioral studies, using a wide variety of paradigms that were introduced or greatly refined in recent years, has generated a new wealth of parametric observations about serial order behavior. What was a mere trickle of neurophysiological studies has grown to a more steady stream of probes of neural sites and mechanisms underlying sequential behavior. Moreover, simulation models of serial behavior generation have begun to open a channel to link cellular dynamics with cognitive and behavioral dynamics. Here we summarize the major results from prominent sequence learning and performance tasks, namely immediate serial recall, typing, 2XN, discrete sequence production, and serial reaction time. These populate a continuum from higher to lower degrees of internal control of sequential organization. The main movement classes covered are speech and keypressing, both involving small amplitude movements that are very amenable to parametric study. A brief synopsis of classes of serial order models, vis-à-vis the detailing of major effects found in the behavioral data, leads to a focus on competitive queuing (CQ) models. Recently, the many behavioral predictive successes of CQ models have been joined by successful prediction of distinctively patterend electrophysiological recordings in prefrontal cortex, wherein parallel activation dynamics of multiple neural ensembles strikingly matches the parallel dynamics predicted by CQ theory. An extended CQ simulation model-the N-STREAMS neural network model-is then examined to highlight issues in ongoing attemptes to accomodate a broader range of behavioral and neurophysiological data within a CQ-consistent theory. Important contemporary issues such as the nature of working memory representations for sequential behavior, and the development and role of chunks in hierarchial control are prominent throughout.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency/Office of Naval Research (N00014-95-1-0409); National Institute of Mental Health (R01 DC02852

Improving Iris Recognition through Quality and Interoperability Metrics

The ability to identify individuals based on their iris is known as iris recognition. Over the past decade iris recognition has garnered much attention because of its strong performance in comparison with other mainstream biometrics such as fingerprint and face recognition. Performance of iris recognition systems is driven by application scenario requirements. Standoff distance, subject cooperation, underlying optics, and illumination are a few examples of these requirements which dictate the nature of images an iris recognition system has to process. Traditional iris recognition systems, dubbed stop and stare , operate under highly constrained conditions. This ensures that the captured image is of sufficient quality so that the success of subsequent processing stages, segmentation, encoding, and matching are not compromised. When acquisition constraints are relaxed, such as for surveillance or iris on the move, the fidelity of subsequent processing steps lessens.;In this dissertation we propose a multi-faceted framework for mitigating the difficulties associated with non-ideal iris. We develop and investigate a comprehensive iris image quality metric that is predictive of iris matching performance. The metric is composed of photometric measures such as defocus, motion blur, and illumination, but also contains domain specific measures such as occlusion, and gaze angle. These measures are then combined through a fusion rule based on Dempster-Shafer theory. Related to iris segmentation, which is arguably one of the most important tasks in iris recognition, we develop metrics which are used to evaluate the precision of the pupil and iris boundaries. Furthermore, we illustrate three methods which take advantage of the proposed segmentation metrics for rectifying incorrect segmentation boundaries. Finally, we look at the issue of iris image interoperability and demonstrate that techniques from the field of hardware fingerprinting can be utilized to improve iris matching performance when images captured from distinct sensors are involved

Real-time analysis of video signals

Many practical and experimental systems employing image processing techniques have been built by other workers for various applications. Most of these systems are computer-based and very few operate in a real time environment. The objective of this work is to build a microprocessor-based system for video image processing. The system is used in conjunction with an on-line TV camera and processing is carried out in real time. The enormous storage requirement of digitized TV signals and the real time constraint suggest that some simplification of the data must take place prior to any viable processing. Data reduction is attained through the representation of objects by their edges, an approach often adopted for feature extraction in pattern recognition systems. A new technique for edge detection by applying comparison criteria to differentials at adjacent pixels of the video image is developed and implemented as a preprocessing hardware unit. A circuit for the generation of the co-ordinates of edge points is constructed to free the processing computer of this task, allowing it more time for on-line analysis of video signals. Besides the edge detector and co-ordinate generator the hardware built consists of a microprocessor system based on a Texas Instruments T.US 9900 device, a first-in-first-out buffer store and interface circuitry to a TV camera and display devices. All hardware modules and their power supplies are assembled in one unit to provide a standalone instrument. The problem chosen for investigation is analysis of motion in a visual scene. Aspects of motion studied concern the tracking of moving objects with simple geometric shapes and description of their motion. More emphasis is paid to the analysis of human eye movements and measurement of its point-of-regard which has many practical applications in the fields of physiology and psychology. This study provides a basis for the design of a processing unit attached to an oculometer to replace bulky minicomputer-based eye motion analysis systems. Programs are written for storage, analysis and display of results in real time