Cross-Spectral Periocular Recognition with Conditional Adversarial Networks

This work addresses the challenge of comparing periocular images captured in different spectra, which is known to produce significant drops in performance in comparison to operating in the same spectrum. We propose the use of Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks, trained to con-vert periocular images between visible and near-infrared spectra, so that biometric verification is carried out in the same spectrum. The proposed setup allows the use of existing feature methods typically optimized to operate in a single spectrum. Recognition experiments are done using a number of off-the-shelf periocular comparators based both on hand-crafted features and CNN descriptors. Using the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Cross-Spectral Iris Images Database (PolyU) as benchmark dataset, our experiments show that cross-spectral performance is substantially improved if both images are converted to the same spectrum, in comparison to matching features extracted from images in different spectra. In addition to this, we fine-tune a CNN based on the ResNet50 architecture, obtaining a cross-spectral periocular performance of EER=1%, and GAR>99% @ FAR=1%, which is comparable to the state-of-the-art with the PolyU database.Comment: Accepted for publication at 2020 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2020

UFPR-Periocular: A Periocular Dataset Collected by Mobile Devices in Unconstrained Scenarios

Recently, ocular biometrics in unconstrained environments using images obtained at visible wavelength have gained the researchers' attention, especially with images captured by mobile devices. Periocular recognition has been demonstrated to be an alternative when the iris trait is not available due to occlusions or low image resolution. However, the periocular trait does not have the high uniqueness presented in the iris trait. Thus, the use of datasets containing many subjects is essential to assess biometric systems' capacity to extract discriminating information from the periocular region. Also, to address the within-class variability caused by lighting and attributes in the periocular region, it is of paramount importance to use datasets with images of the same subject captured in distinct sessions. As the datasets available in the literature do not present all these factors, in this work, we present a new periocular dataset containing samples from 1,122 subjects, acquired in 3 sessions by 196 different mobile devices. The images were captured under unconstrained environments with just a single instruction to the participants: to place their eyes on a region of interest. We also performed an extensive benchmark with several Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architectures and models that have been employed in state-of-the-art approaches based on Multi-class Classification, Multitask Learning, Pairwise Filters Network, and Siamese Network. The results achieved in the closed- and open-world protocol, considering the identification and verification tasks, show that this area still needs research and development