CardioCam: Leveraging Camera on Mobile Devices to Verify Users While Their Heart is Pumping

With the increasing prevalence of mobile and IoT devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, smart-home appliances), massive private and sensitive information are stored on these devices. To prevent unauthorized access on these devices, existing user verification solutions either rely on the complexity of user-defined secrets (e.g., password) or resort to specialized biometric sensors (e.g., fingerprint reader), but the users may still suffer from various attacks, such as password theft, shoulder surfing, smudge, and forged biometrics attacks. In this paper, we propose, CardioCam, a low-cost, general, hard-to-forge user verification system leveraging the unique cardiac biometrics extracted from the readily available built-in cameras in mobile and IoT devices. We demonstrate that the unique cardiac features can be extracted from the cardiac motion patterns in fingertips, by pressing on the built-in camera. To mitigate the impacts of various ambient lighting conditions and human movements under practical scenarios, CardioCam develops a gradient-based technique to optimize the camera configuration, and dynamically selects the most sensitive pixels in a camera frame to extract reliable cardiac motion patterns. Furthermore, the morphological characteristic analysis is deployed to derive user-specific cardiac features, and a feature transformation scheme grounded on Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is developed to enhance the robustness of cardiac biometrics for effective user verification. With the prototyped system, extensive experiments involving 25 subjects are conducted to demonstrate that CardioCam can achieve effective and reliable user verification with over 99% average true positive rate (TPR) while maintaining the false positive rate (FPR) as low as 4%

Gait recognition with shifted energy image and structural feature extraction

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2012 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.In this paper, we present a novel and efficient gait recognition system. The proposed system uses two novel gait representations, i.e., the shifted energy image and the gait structural profile, which have increased robustness to some classes of structural variations. Furthermore, we introduce a novel method for the simulation of walking conditions and the generation of artificial subjects that are used for the application of linear discriminant analysis. In the decision stage, the two representations are fused. Thorough experimental evaluation, conducted using one traditional and two new databases, demonstrates the advantages of the proposed system in comparison with current state-of-the-art systems

Face Identification and Clustering

In this thesis, we study two problems based on clustering algorithms. In the first problem, we study the role of visual attributes using an agglomerative clustering algorithm to whittle down the search area where the number of classes is high to improve the performance of clustering. We observe that as we add more attributes, the clustering performance increases overall. In the second problem, we study the role of clustering in aggregating templates in a 1:N open set protocol using multi-shot video as a probe. We observe that by increasing the number of clusters, the performance increases with respect to the baseline and reaches a peak, after which increasing the number of clusters causes the performance to degrade. Experiments are conducted using recently introduced unconstrained IARPA Janus IJB-A, CS2, and CS3 face recognition datasets

Quality Aware Network for Set to Set Recognition

This paper targets on the problem of set to set recognition, which learns the metric between two image sets. Images in each set belong to the same identity. Since images in a set can be complementary, they hopefully lead to higher accuracy in practical applications. However, the quality of each sample cannot be guaranteed, and samples with poor quality will hurt the metric. In this paper, the quality aware network (QAN) is proposed to confront this problem, where the quality of each sample can be automatically learned although such information is not explicitly provided in the training stage. The network has two branches, where the first branch extracts appearance feature embedding for each sample and the other branch predicts quality score for each sample. Features and quality scores of all samples in a set are then aggregated to generate the final feature embedding. We show that the two branches can be trained in an end-to-end manner given only the set-level identity annotation. Analysis on gradient spread of this mechanism indicates that the quality learned by the network is beneficial to set-to-set recognition and simplifies the distribution that the network needs to fit. Experiments on both face verification and person re-identification show advantages of the proposed QAN. The source code and network structure can be downloaded at https://github.com/sciencefans/Quality-Aware-Network.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 201

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

FinBTech: Blockchain-Based Video and Voice Authentication System for Enhanced Security in Financial Transactions Utilizing FaceNet512 and Gaussian Mixture Models

In the digital age, it is crucial to make sure that financial transactions are as secure and reliable as possible. This abstract offers a ground-breaking method that combines smart contracts, blockchain technology, FaceNet512 for improved face recognition, and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) for speech authentication to create a system for video and audio verification that is unmatched. Smart contracts and the immutable ledger of the blockchain are combined to offer a safe and open environment for financial transactions. FaceNet512 and GMM offer multi-factor biometric authentication simultaneously, enhancing security to new heights. By combining cutting-edge technology, this system offers a strong defense against identity theft and illegal access, establishing a new benchmark for safe financial transactions

Fast, collaborative acquisition of multi-view face images using a camera network and its impact on real-time human identification

Biometric systems have been typically designed to operate under controlled environments based on previously acquired photographs and videos. But recent terror attacks, security threats and intrusion attempts have necessitated a transition to modern biometric systems that can identify humans in real-time under unconstrained environments. Distributed camera networks are appropriate for unconstrained scenarios because they can provide multiple views of a scene, thus offering tolerance against variable pose of a human subject and possible occlusions. In dynamic environments, the face images are continually arriving at the base station with different quality, pose and resolution. Designing a fusion strategy poses significant challenges. Such a scenario demands that only the relevant information is processed and the verdict (match / no match) regarding a particular subject is quickly (yet accurately) released so that more number of subjects in the scene can be evaluated.;To address these, we designed a wireless data acquisition system that is capable of acquiring multi-view faces accurately and at a rapid rate. The idea of epipolar geometry is exploited to get high multi-view face detection rates. Face images are labeled to their corresponding poses and are transmitted to the base station. To evaluate the impact of face images acquired using our real-time face image acquisition system on the overall recognition accuracy, we interface it with a face matching subsystem and thus create a prototype real-time multi-view face recognition system. For front face matching, we use the commercial PittPatt software. For non-frontal matching, we use a Local binary Pattern based classifier. Matching scores obtained from both frontal and non-frontal face images are fused for final classification. Our results show significant improvement in recognition accuracy, especially when the front face images are of low resolution