Multimodal person recognition for human-vehicle interaction

Next-generation vehicles will undoubtedly feature biometric person recognition as part of an effort to improve the driving experience. Today's technology prevents such systems from operating satisfactorily under adverse conditions. A proposed framework for achieving person recognition successfully combines different biometric modalities, borne out in two case studies

A Survey on Ear Biometrics

Recognizing people by their ear has recently received significant attention in the literature. Several reasons account for this trend: first, ear recognition does not suffer from some problems associated with other non contact biometrics, such as face recognition; second, it is the most promising candidate for combination with the face in the context of multi-pose face recognition; and third, the ear can be used for human recognition in surveillance videos where the face may be occluded completely or in part. Further, the ear appears to degrade little with age. Even though, current ear detection and recognition systems have reached a certain level of maturity, their success is limited to controlled indoor conditions. In addition to variation in illumination, other open research problems include hair occlusion; earprint forensics; ear symmetry; ear classification; and ear individuality. This paper provides a detailed survey of research conducted in ear detection and recognition. It provides an up-to-date review of the existing literature revealing the current state-of-art for not only those who are working in this area but also for those who might exploit this new approach. Furthermore, it offers insights into some unsolved ear recognition problems as well as ear databases available for researchers

MobiBits: Multimodal Mobile Biometric Database

This paper presents a novel database comprising representations of five different biometric characteristics, collected in a mobile, unconstrained or semi-constrained setting with three different mobile devices, including characteristics previously unavailable in existing datasets, namely hand images, thermal hand images, and thermal face images, all acquired with a mobile, off-the-shelf device. In addition to this collection of data we perform an extensive set of experiments providing insight on benchmark recognition performance that can be achieved with these data, carried out with existing commercial and academic biometric solutions. This is the first known to us mobile biometric database introducing samples of biometric traits such as thermal hand images and thermal face images. We hope that this contribution will make a valuable addition to the already existing databases and enable new experiments and studies in the field of mobile authentication. The MobiBits database is made publicly available to the research community at no cost for non-commercial purposes.Comment: Submitted for the BIOSIG2018 conference on June 18, 2018. Accepted for publication on July 20, 201

Unifying the Visible and Passive Infrared Bands: Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Multi-Spectral Face Recognition

Face biometrics leverages tools and technology in order to automate the identification of individuals. In most cases, biometric face recognition (FR) can be used for forensic purposes, but there remains the issue related to the integration of technology into the legal system of the court. The biggest challenge with the acceptance of the face as a modality used in court is the reliability of such systems under varying pose, illumination and expression, which has been an active and widely explored area of research over the last few decades (e.g. same-spectrum or homogeneous matching). The heterogeneous FR problem, which deals with matching face images from different sensors, should be examined for the benefit of military and law enforcement applications as well. In this work we are concerned primarily with visible band images (380-750 nm) and the infrared (IR) spectrum, which has become an area of growing interest.;For homogeneous FR systems, we formulate and develop an efficient, semi-automated, direct matching-based FR framework, that is designed to operate efficiently when face data is captured using either visible or passive IR sensors. Thus, it can be applied in both daytime and nighttime environments. First, input face images are geometrically normalized using our pre-processing pipeline prior to feature-extraction. Then, face-based features including wrinkles, veins, as well as edges of facial characteristics, are detected and extracted for each operational band (visible, MWIR, and LWIR). Finally, global and local face-based matching is applied, before fusion is performed at the score level. Although this proposed matcher performs well when same-spectrum FR is performed, regardless of spectrum, a challenge exists when cross-spectral FR matching is performed. The second framework is for the heterogeneous FR problem, and deals with the issue of bridging the gap across the visible and passive infrared (MWIR and LWIR) spectrums. Specifically, we investigate the benefits and limitations of using synthesized visible face images from thermal and vice versa, in cross-spectral face recognition systems when utilizing canonical correlation analysis (CCA) and locally linear embedding (LLE), a manifold learning technique for dimensionality reduction. Finally, by conducting an extensive experimental study we establish that the combination of the proposed synthesis and demographic filtering scheme increases system performance in terms of rank-1 identification rate

A framework for improving the performance of verification algorithms with a low false positive rate requirement and limited training data

In this paper we address the problem of matching patterns in the so-called verification setting in which a novel, query pattern is verified against a single training pattern: the decision sought is whether the two match (i.e. belong to the same class) or not. Unlike previous work which has universally focused on the development of more discriminative distance functions between patterns, here we consider the equally important and pervasive task of selecting a distance threshold which fits a particular operational requirement - specifically, the target false positive rate (FPR). First, we argue on theoretical grounds that a data-driven approach is inherently ill-conditioned when the desired FPR is low, because by the very nature of the challenge only a small portion of training data affects or is affected by the desired threshold. This leads us to propose a general, statistical model-based method instead. Our approach is based on the interpretation of an inter-pattern distance as implicitly defining a pattern embedding which approximately distributes patterns according to an isotropic multi-variate normal distribution in some space. This interpretation is then used to show that the distribution of training inter-pattern distances is the non-central chi2 distribution, differently parameterized for each class. Thus, to make the class-specific threshold choice we propose a novel analysis-by-synthesis iterative algorithm which estimates the three free parameters of the model (for each class) using task-specific constraints. The validity of the premises of our work and the effectiveness of the proposed method are demonstrated by applying the method to the task of set-based face verification on a large database of pseudo-random head motion videos.Comment: IEEE/IAPR International Joint Conference on Biometrics, 201

Facial soft biometrics for recognition in the wild: recent works, annotation and COTS evaluation

The role of soft biometrics to enhance person recognition systems in unconstrained scenarios has not been extensively studied. Here, we explore the utility of the following modalities: gender, ethnicity, age, glasses, beard and moustache. We consider two assumptions: i) manual estimation of soft biometrics, and ii) automatic estimation from two Commercial Off-The-Shelf systems (COTS). All experiments are reported using the LFW database. First, we study the discrimination capabilities of soft biometrics standalone. Then, experiments are carried out fusing soft biometrics with two state-of-the-art face recognition systems based on deep learning. We observe that soft biometrics is a valuable complement to the face modality in unconstrained scenarios, with relative improvements up to 40%=15% in the verification performance when using manual/automatic soft biometrics estimation. Results are reproducible as we make public our manual annotations and COTS outputs of soft biometrics over LFW, as well as the face recognition scoresThis work was funded by Spanish Guardia Civil and project CogniMetrics (TEC2015-70627-R) from MINECO/FEDE

Analysis of spatio-temporal representations for robust footstep recognition with deep residual neural networks

IEEE: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.”Human footsteps can provide a unique behavioural pattern for robust biometric systems. We propose spatio-temporal footstep representations from floor-only sensor data in advanced computational models for automatic biometric verification. Our models deliver an artificial intelligence capable of effectively differentiating the fine-grained variability of footsteps between legitimate users (clients) and impostor users of the biometric system. The methodology is validated in the largest to date footstep database, containing nearly 20,000 footstep signals from more than 120 users. The database is organized by considering a large cohort of impostors and a small set of clients to verify the reliability of biometric systems. We provide experimental results in 3 critical data-driven security scenarios, according to the amount of footstep data made available for model training: at airports security checkpoints (smallest training set), workspace environments (medium training set) and home environments (largest training set). We report state-of-the-art footstep recognition rates with an optimal equal false acceptance and false rejection rate of 0.7% (equal error rate), an improvement ratio of 371% from previous state-of-the-art. We perform a feature analysis of deep residual neural networks showing effective clustering of client's footstep data and provide insights of the feature learning process.This work has been partially supported by Cognimetrics TEC2015-70627-R MINECO/FEDE

Demographic Bias in Presentation Attack Detection of Iris Recognition Systems

With the widespread use of biometric systems, the demographic bias problem raises more attention. Although many studies addressed bias issues in biometric verification, there are no works that analyze the bias in presentation attack detection (PAD) decisions. Hence, we investigate and analyze the demographic bias in iris PAD algorithms in this paper. To enable a clear discussion, we adapt the notions of differential performance and differential outcome to the PAD problem. We study the bias in iris PAD using three baselines (hand-crafted, transfer-learning, and training from scratch) using the NDCLD-2013 database. The experimental results point out that female users will be significantly less protected by the PAD, in comparison to males.Comment: accepted for publication at EUSIPCO202