Deep Neural Network and Data Augmentation Methodology for off-axis iris segmentation in wearable headsets

A data augmentation methodology is presented and applied to generate a large dataset of off-axis iris regions and train a low-complexity deep neural network. Although of low complexity the resulting network achieves a high level of accuracy in iris region segmentation for challenging off-axis eye-patches. Interestingly, this network is also shown to achieve high levels of performance for regular, frontal, segmentation of iris regions, comparing favorably with state-of-the-art techniques of significantly higher complexity. Due to its lower complexity, this network is well suited for deployment in embedded applications such as augmented and mixed reality headsets

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

Age Sensitivity of Face Recognition Algorithms

This paper investigates the performance degradation of facial recognition systems due to the influence of age. A comparative analysis of verification performance is conducted for four subspace projection techniques combined with four different distance metrics. The experimental results based on a subset of the MORPH-II database show that the choice of subspace projection technique and associated distance metric can have a significant impact on the performance of the face recognition system for particular age groups

FaceQnet: Quality Assessment for Face Recognition based on Deep Learning

In this paper we develop a Quality Assessment approach for face recognition based on deep learning. The method consists of a Convolutional Neural Network, FaceQnet, that is used to predict the suitability of a specific input image for face recognition purposes. The training of FaceQnet is done using the VGGFace2 database. We employ the BioLab-ICAO framework for labeling the VGGFace2 images with quality information related to their ICAO compliance level. The groundtruth quality labels are obtained using FaceNet to generate comparison scores. We employ the groundtruth data to fine-tune a ResNet-based CNN, making it capable of returning a numerical quality measure for each input image. Finally, we verify if the FaceQnet scores are suitable to predict the expected performance when employing a specific image for face recognition with a COTS face recognition system. Several conclusions can be drawn from this work, most notably: 1) we managed to employ an existing ICAO compliance framework and a pretrained CNN to automatically label data with quality information, 2) we trained FaceQnet for quality estimation by fine-tuning a pre-trained face recognition network (ResNet-50), and 3) we have shown that the predictions from FaceQnet are highly correlated with the face recognition accuracy of a state-of-the-art commercial system not used during development. FaceQnet is publicly available in GitHub.Comment: Preprint version of a paper accepted at ICB 201