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

Directional Sensitivity of Gaze-Collinearity Features in Liveness Detection

To increase the trust in using face recognition systems, these need to be capable of differentiating between face images captured from a real person and those captured from photos or similar artifacts presented at the sensor. Methods have been published for face liveness detection by measuring the gaze of a user while the user tracks an object on the screen, which appears at pre-defined, places randomly. In this paper we explore the sensitivity of such a system to different stimulus alignments. The aim is to establish whether there is such sensitivity and if so to explore how this may be exploited for improving the design of the stimulus. The results suggest that collecting feature points along the horizontal direction is more effective than the vertical direction for liveness detection

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

Vision-Based Production of Personalized Video

In this paper we present a novel vision-based system for the automated production of personalised video souvenirs for visitors in leisure and cultural heritage venues. Visitors are visually identified and tracked through a camera network. The system produces a personalized DVD souvenir at the end of a visitor’s stay allowing visitors to relive their experiences. We analyze how we identify visitors by fusing facial and body features, how we track visitors, how the tracker recovers from failures due to occlusions, as well as how we annotate and compile the final product. Our experiments demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach

On Acquisition and Analysis of a Dataset Comprising of Gait, Ear and Semantic data

In outdoor scenarios such as surveillance where there is very little control over the environments, complex computer vision algorithms are often required for analysis. However constrained environments, such as walkways in airports where the surroundings and the path taken by individuals can be controlled, provide an ideal application for such systems. Figure 1.1 depicts an idealised constrained environment. The path taken by the subject is restricted to a narrow path and once inside is in a volume where lighting and other conditions are controlled to facilitate biometric analysis. The ability to control the surroundings and the flow of people greatly simplifes the computer vision task, compared to typical unconstrained environments. Even though biometric datasets with greater than one hundred people are increasingly common, there is still very little known about the inter and intra-subject variation in many biometrics. This information is essential to estimate the recognition capability and limits of automatic recognition systems. In order to accurately estimate the inter- and the intra- class variance, substantially larger datasets are required [40]. Covariates such as facial expression, headwear, footwear type, surface type and carried items are attracting increasing attention; although considering the potentially large impact on an individuals biometrics, large trials need to be conducted to establish how much variance results. This chapter is the first description of the multibiometric data acquired using the University of Southampton's Multi-Biometric Tunnel [26, 37]; a biometric portal using automatic gait, face and ear recognition for identification purposes. The tunnel provides a constrained environment and is ideal for use in high throughput security scenarios and for the collection of large datasets. We describe the current state of data acquisition of face, gait, ear, and semantic data and present early results showing the quality and range of data that has been collected. The main novelties of this dataset in comparison with other multi-biometric datasets are: 1. gait data exists for multiple views and is synchronised, allowing 3D reconstruction and analysis; 2. the face data is a sequence of images allowing for face recognition in video; 3. the ear data is acquired in a relatively unconstrained environment, as a subject walks past; and 4. the semantic data is considerably more extensive than has been available previously. We shall aim to show the advantages of this new data in biometric analysis, though the scope for such analysis is considerably greater than time and space allows for here

The DRIVE-SAFE project: signal processing and advanced information technologies for improving driving prudence and accidents

In this paper, we will talk about the Drivesafe project whose aim is creating conditions for prudent driving on highways and roadways with the purposes of reducing accidents caused by driver behavior. To achieve these primary goals, critical data is being collected from multimodal sensors (such as cameras, microphones, and other sensors) to build a unique databank on driver behavior. We are developing system and technologies for analyzing the data and automatically determining potentially dangerous situations (such as driver fatigue, distraction, etc.). Based on the findings from these studies, we will propose systems for warning the drivers and taking other precautionary measures to avoid accidents once a dangerous situation is detected. In order to address these issues a national consortium has been formed including Automotive Research Center (OTAM), Koç University, Istanbul Technical University, Sabancı University, Ford A.S., Renault A.S., and Fiat A. Ş

Fair comparison of skin detection approaches on publicly available datasets

Skin detection is the process of discriminating skin and non-skin regions in a digital image and it is widely used in several applications ranging from hand gesture analysis to track body parts and face detection. Skin detection is a challenging problem which has drawn extensive attention from the research community, nevertheless a fair comparison among approaches is very difficult due to the lack of a common benchmark and a unified testing protocol. In this work, we investigate the most recent researches in this field and we propose a fair comparison among approaches using several different datasets. The major contributions of this work are an exhaustive literature review of skin color detection approaches, a framework to evaluate and combine different skin detector approaches, whose source code is made freely available for future research, and an extensive experimental comparison among several recent methods which have also been used to define an ensemble that works well in many different problems. Experiments are carried out in 10 different datasets including more than 10000 labelled images: experimental results confirm that the best method here proposed obtains a very good performance with respect to other stand-alone approaches, without requiring ad hoc parameter tuning. A MATLAB version of the framework for testing and of the methods proposed in this paper will be freely available from https://github.com/LorisNann