Palmprint Gender Classification Using Deep Learning Methods

Gender identification is an important technique that can improve the performance of authentication systems by reducing searching space and speeding up the matching process. Several biometric traits have been used to ascertain human gender. Among them, the human palmprint possesses several discriminating features such as principal-lines, wrinkles, ridges, and minutiae features and that offer cues for gender identification. The goal of this work is to develop novel deep-learning techniques to determine gender from palmprint images. PolyU and CASIA palmprint databases with 90,000 and 5502 images respectively were used for training and testing purposes in this research. After ROI extraction and data augmentation were performed, various convolutional and deep learning-based classification approaches were empirically designed, optimized, and tested. Results of gender classification as high as 94.87% were achieved on the PolyU palmprint database and 90.70% accuracy on the CASIA palmprint database. Optimal performance was achieved by combining two different pre-trained and fine-tuned deep CNNs (VGGNet and DenseNet) through score level average fusion. In addition, Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) was also implemented to ascertain which specific regions of the palmprint are most discriminative for gender classification

Deep Palmprint Recognition with Alignment and Augmentation of Limited Training Samples

This paper builds upon a previously proposed automatic palmprint alignment and classification system. The proposed system was geared towards palmprints acquired from either contact or contactless sensors. It was robust to finger location and fist shape changes—accurately extracting the palmprints in images without fingers. An extension to this previous work includes comparisons of traditional and deep learning models, both with hyperparameter tuning. The proposed methods are compared with related verification systems and a detailed evaluation of open-set identification. The best results were yielded by a proposed Convolutional Neural Network, based on VGG-16, and outperforming tuned VGG-16 and Xception architectures. All deep learning algorithms are provided with augmented data, included in the tuning process, enabling significant accuracy gains. Highlights include near-zero and zero EER on IITD-Palmprint verification using one training sample and leave-one-out strategy, respectively. Therefore, the proposed palmprint system is practical as it is effective on data containing many and few training examples

Building a Strong Undergraduate Research Culture in African Universities

Africa had a late start in the race to setting up and obtaining universities with research quality fundamentals. According to Mamdani [5], the first colonial universities were few and far between: Makerere in East Africa, Ibadan and Legon in West Africa. This last place in the race, compared to other continents, has had tremendous implications in the development plans for the continent. For Africa, the race has been difficult from a late start to an insurmountable litany of problems that include difficulty in equipment acquisition, lack of capacity, limited research and development resources and lack of investments in local universities. In fact most of these universities are very recent with many less than 50 years in business except a few. To help reduce the labor costs incurred by the colonial masters of shipping Europeans to Africa to do mere clerical jobs, they started training ―workshops‖ calling them technical or business colleges. According to Mamdani, meeting colonial needs was to be achieved while avoiding the ―Indian disease‖ in Africa -- that is, the development of an educated middle class, a group most likely to carry the virus of nationalism. Upon independence, most of these ―workshops‖ were turned into national ―universities‖, but with no clear role in national development. These national ―universities‖ were catering for children of the new African political elites. Through the seventies and eighties, most African universities were still without development agendas and were still doing business as usual. Meanwhile, governments strapped with lack of money saw no need of putting more scarce resources into big white elephants. By mid-eighties, even the UN and IMF were calling for a limit on funding African universities. In today‘s African university, the traditional curiosity driven research model has been replaced by a market-driven model dominated by a consultancy culture according to Mamdani (Mamdani, Mail and Guardian Online). The prevailing research culture as intellectual life in universities has been reduced to bare-bones classroom activity, seminars and workshops have migrated to hotels and workshop attendance going with transport allowances and per diems (Mamdani, Mail and Guardian Online). There is need to remedy this situation and that is the focus of this paper

Offline Handwriting Signature Verification: A Transfer Learning and Feature Selection Approach

Handwritten signature verification poses a formidable challenge in biometrics and document authenticity. The objective is to ascertain the authenticity of a provided handwritten signature, distinguishing between genuine and forged ones. This issue has many applications in sectors such as finance, legal documentation, and security. Currently, the field of computer vision and machine learning has made significant progress in the domain of handwritten signature verification. The outcomes, however, may be enhanced depending on the acquired findings, the structure of the datasets, and the used models. Four stages make up our suggested strategy. First, we collected a large dataset of 12600 images from 420 distinct individuals, and each individual has 30 signatures of a certain kind (All authors signatures are genuine). In the subsequent stage, the best features from each image were extracted using a deep learning model named MobileNetV2. During the feature selection step, three selectors neighborhood component analysis (NCA), Chi2, and mutual info (MI) were used to pull out 200, 300, 400, and 500 features, giving a total of 12 feature vectors. Finally, 12 results have been obtained by applying machine learning techniques such as SVM with kernels (rbf, poly, and linear), KNN, DT, Linear Discriminant Analysis, and Naive Bayes. Without employing feature selection techniques, our suggested offline signature verification achieved a classification accuracy of 91.3%, whereas using the NCA feature selection approach with just 300 features it achieved a classification accuracy of 97.7%. High classification accuracy was achieved using the designed and suggested model, which also has the benefit of being a self-organized framework. Consequently, using the optimum minimally chosen features, the proposed method could identify the best model performance and result validation prediction vectors.Comment: 11 page

Signal processing and machine learning techniques for human verification based on finger textures

PhD ThesisIn recent years, Finger Textures (FTs) have attracted considerable attention as potential biometric characteristics. They can provide robust recognition performance as they have various human-speci c features, such as wrinkles and apparent lines distributed along the inner surface of all ngers. The main topic of this thesis is verifying people according to their unique FT patterns by exploiting signal processing and machine learning techniques. A Robust Finger Segmentation (RFS) method is rst proposed to isolate nger images from a hand area. It is able to detect the ngers as objects from a hand image. An e cient adaptive nger segmentation method is also suggested to address the problem of alignment variations in the hand image called the Adaptive and Robust Finger Segmentation (ARFS) method. A new Multi-scale Sobel Angles Local Binary Pattern (MSALBP) feature extraction method is proposed which combines the Sobel direction angles with the Multi-Scale Local Binary Pattern (MSLBP). Moreover, an enhanced method called the Enhanced Local Line Binary Pattern (ELLBP) is designed to e ciently analyse the FT patterns. As a result, a powerful human veri cation scheme based on nger Feature Level Fusion with a Probabilistic Neural Network (FLFPNN) is proposed. A multi-object fusion method, termed the Finger Contribution Fusion Neural Network (FCFNN), combines the contribution scores of the nger objects. The veri cation performances are examined in the case of missing FT areas. Consequently, to overcome nger regions which are poorly imaged a method is suggested to salvage missing FT elements by exploiting the information embedded within the trained Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN). Finally, a novel method to produce a Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve from a PNN is suggested. Furthermore, additional development to this method is applied to generate the ROC graph from the FCFNN. Three databases are employed for evaluation: The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Contact-free 3D/2D (PolyU3D2D), Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and Spectral 460nm (S460) from the CASIA Multi-Spectral (CASIAMS) databases. Comparative simulation studies con rm the e ciency of the proposed methods for human veri cation. The main advantage of both segmentation approaches, the RFS and ARFS, is that they can collect all the FT features. The best results have been benchmarked for the ELLBP feature extraction with the FCFNN, where the best Equal Error Rate (EER) values for the three databases PolyU3D2D, IIT Delhi and CASIAMS (S460) have been achieved 0.11%, 1.35% and 0%, respectively. The proposed salvage approach for the missing feature elements has the capability to enhance the veri cation performance for the FLFPNN. Moreover, ROC graphs have been successively established from the PNN and FCFNN.the ministry of higher education and scientific research in Iraq (MOHESR); the Technical college of Mosul; the Iraqi Cultural Attach e; the active people in the MOHESR, who strongly supported Iraqi students