Biometrics-as-a-Service: A Framework to Promote Innovative Biometric Recognition in the Cloud

Biometric recognition, or simply biometrics, is the use of biological attributes such as face, fingerprints or iris in order to recognize an individual in an automated manner. A key application of biometrics is authentication; i.e., using said biological attributes to provide access by verifying the claimed identity of an individual. This paper presents a framework for Biometrics-as-a-Service (BaaS) that performs biometric matching operations in the cloud, while relying on simple and ubiquitous consumer devices such as smartphones. Further, the framework promotes innovation by providing interfaces for a plurality of software developers to upload their matching algorithms to the cloud. When a biometric authentication request is submitted, the system uses a criteria to automatically select an appropriate matching algorithm. Every time a particular algorithm is selected, the corresponding developer is rendered a micropayment. This creates an innovative and competitive ecosystem that benefits both software developers and the consumers. As a case study, we have implemented the following: (a) an ocular recognition system using a mobile web interface providing user access to a biometric authentication service, and (b) a Linux-based virtual machine environment used by software developers for algorithm development and submission

A preliminary approach to intelligent x-ray imaging for baggage inspection at airports

Identifying explosives in baggage at airports relies on being able to characterize the materials that make up an X-ray image. If a suspicion is generated during the imaging process (step 1), the image data could be enhanced by adapting the scanning parameters (step 2). This paper addresses the first part of this problem and uses textural signatures to recognize and characterize materials and hence enabling system control. Directional Gabor-type filtering was applied to a series of different X-ray images. Images were processed in such a way as to simulate a line scanning geometry. Based on our experiments with images of industrial standards and our own samples it was found that different materials could be characterized in terms of the frequency range and orientation of the filters. It was also found that the signal strength generated by the filters could be used as an indicator of visibility and optimum imaging conditions predicted

Curved Gabor Filters for Fingerprint Image Enhancement

Gabor filters play an important role in many application areas for the enhancement of various types of images and the extraction of Gabor features. For the purpose of enhancing curved structures in noisy images, we introduce curved Gabor filters which locally adapt their shape to the direction of flow. These curved Gabor filters enable the choice of filter parameters which increase the smoothing power without creating artifacts in the enhanced image. In this paper, curved Gabor filters are applied to the curved ridge and valley structure of low-quality fingerprint images. First, we combine two orientation field estimation methods in order to obtain a more robust estimation for very noisy images. Next, curved regions are constructed by following the respective local orientation and they are used for estimating the local ridge frequency. Lastly, curved Gabor filters are defined based on curved regions and they are applied for the enhancement of low-quality fingerprint images. Experimental results on the FVC2004 databases show improvements of this approach in comparison to state-of-the-art enhancement methods

Combining multiple Iris matchers using advanced fusion techniques to enhance Iris matching performance

M.Phil. (Electrical And Electronic Engineering)The enormous increase in technology advancement and the need to secure information e ectively has led to the development and implementation of iris image acquisition technologies for automated iris recognition systems. The iris biometric is gaining popularity and is becoming a reliable and a robust modality for future biometric security. Its wide application can be extended to biometric security areas such as national ID cards, banking systems such as ATM, e-commerce, biometric passports but not applicable in forensic investigations. Iris recognition has gained valuable attention in biometric research due to the uniqueness of its textures and its high recognition rates when employed on high biometric security areas. Identity veri cation for individuals becomes a challenging task when it has to be automated with a high accuracy and robustness against spoo ng attacks and repudiation. Current recognition systems are highly a ected by noise as a result of segmentation failure, and this noise factors increase the biometric error rates such as; the FAR and the FRR. This dissertation reports an investigation of score level fusion methods which can be used to enhance iris matching performance. The fusion methods implemented in this project includes, simple sum rule, weighted sum rule fusion, minimum score and an adaptive weighted sum rule. The proposed approach uses an adaptive fusion which maps feature quality scores with the matcher. The fused scores were generated from four various iris matchers namely; the NHD matcher, the WED matcher, the WHD matcher and the POC matcher. To ensure homogeneity of matching scores before fusion, raw scores were normalized using the tanh-estimators method, because it is e cient and robust against outliers. The results were tested against two publicly available databases; namely, CASIA and UBIRIS using two statistical and biometric system measurements namely the AUC and the EER. The results of these two measures gives the AUC = 99:36% for CASIA left images, the AUC = 99:18% for CASIA right images, the AUC = 99:59% for UBIRIS database and the Equal Error Rate (EER) of 0.041 for CASIA left images, the EER = 0:087 for CASIA right images and with the EER = 0:038 for UBIRIS images

Pigment Melanin: Pattern for Iris Recognition

Recognition of iris based on Visible Light (VL) imaging is a difficult problem because of the light reflection from the cornea. Nonetheless, pigment melanin provides a rich feature source in VL, unavailable in Near-Infrared (NIR) imaging. This is due to biological spectroscopy of eumelanin, a chemical not stimulated in NIR. In this case, a plausible solution to observe such patterns may be provided by an adaptive procedure using a variational technique on the image histogram. To describe the patterns, a shape analysis method is used to derive feature-code for each subject. An important question is how much the melanin patterns, extracted from VL, are independent of iris texture in NIR. With this question in mind, the present investigation proposes fusion of features extracted from NIR and VL to boost the recognition performance. We have collected our own database (UTIRIS) consisting of both NIR and VL images of 158 eyes of 79 individuals. This investigation demonstrates that the proposed algorithm is highly sensitive to the patterns of cromophores and improves the iris recognition rate.Comment: To be Published on Special Issue on Biometrics, IEEE Transaction on Instruments and Measurements, Volume 59, Issue number 4, April 201

Feature Matching in Iris Recognition System using MATLAB

Iris recognition system is a secure human authentication in biometric technology. Iris recognition system consists of five stages. They are Feature matching, Feature encoding, Iris Normalization, Iris Segmentation and Image acquisition. In Image acquisition, the eye Image is captured from the CASIA database, the Image must have good quality with high resolution to process next steps. In Iris Segmentation, the Iris part is detected by using Hough transform technique and Canny Edge detection technique. Iris from an eye Image segmented. In normalization, the Iris region is converted from the circular region into a rectangular region by using polar transform technique. In feature encoding, the normalized Iris can be encoded in the form of binary bit format by using Gabor filter techniques.  In feature matching, the encoded Iris template is compared with database eye Image of Iris template and generated the matching score by using Hamming distance technique and Euclidean distance technique. Based on the matching score, we get the result. This project is developed using Image processing toolbox of Matlab software

Iris Recognition: Robust Processing, Synthesis, Performance Evaluation and Applications

The popularity of iris biometric has grown considerably over the past few years. It has resulted in the development of a large number of new iris processing and encoding algorithms. In this dissertation, we will discuss the following aspects of the iris recognition problem: iris image acquisition, iris quality, iris segmentation, iris encoding, performance enhancement and two novel applications.;The specific claimed novelties of this dissertation include: (1) a method to generate a large scale realistic database of iris images; (2) a crosspectral iris matching method for comparison of images in color range against images in Near-Infrared (NIR) range; (3) a method to evaluate iris image and video quality; (4) a robust quality-based iris segmentation method; (5) several approaches to enhance recognition performance and security of traditional iris encoding techniques; (6) a method to increase iris capture volume for acquisition of iris on the move from a distance and (7) a method to improve performance of biometric systems due to available soft data in the form of links and connections in a relevant social network