Advanced Biometric Technologies: Emerging Scenarios and Research Trends

Biometric systems are the ensemble of devices, procedures, and algorithms for the automatic recognition of individuals by means of their physiological or behavioral characteristics. Although biometric systems are traditionally used in high-security applications, recent advancements are enabling the application of these systems in less-constrained conditions with non-ideal samples and with real-time performance. Consequently, biometric technologies are being increasingly used in a wide variety of emerging application scenarios, including public infrastructures, e-government, humanitarian services, and user-centric applications. This chapter introduces recent biometric technologies, reviews emerging scenarios for biometric recognition, and discusses research trends

Predicting sex as a soft-biometrics from device interaction swipe gestures

Touch and multi-touch gestures are becoming the most common way to interact with technology such as smart phones, tablets and other mobile devices. The latest touch-screen input capacities have tremendously increased the quantity and quality of available gesture data, which has led to the exploration of its use in multiple disciplines from psychology to biometrics. Following research studies undertaken in similar modalities such as keystroke and mouse usage biometrics, the present work proposes the use of swipe gesture data for the prediction of soft-biometrics, specifically the user's sex. This paper details the software and protocol used for the data collection, the feature set extracted and subsequent machine learning analysis. Within this analysis, the BestFirst feature selection technique and classification algorithms (naïve Bayes, logistic regression, support vector machine and decision tree) have been tested. The results of this exploratory analysis have confirmed the possibility of sex prediction from the swipe gesture data, obtaining an encouraging 78% accuracy rate using swipe gesture data from two different directions. These results will hopefully encourage further research in this area, where the prediction of soft-biometrics traits from swipe gesture data can play an important role in enhancing the authentication processes based on touch-screen devices

Genetic And Evolutionary Biometrics:Multiobjective, Multimodal, Feature Selection/Weighting For Tightly Coupled Periocular And Face Recognition

The Genetic & Evolutionary Computation (GEC) research community has seen the emergence of a new subarea, referred to as Genetic & Evolutionary Biometrics (GEB), as GECs have been applied to solve a variety of biometric problems. In this dissertation, we present three new GEB techniques for multibiometric recognition: Genetic & Evolutionary Feature Selection (GEFeS), Weighting (GEFeW), and Weighting/Selection (GEFeWS). Instead of selecting the most salient individual features, these techniques evolve subsets of the most salient combinations of features and/or weight features based on their discriminative ability in an effort to increase accuracy while decreasing the overall number of features needed for recognition. We also incorporate cross validation into our best performing technique in an attempt to evolve feature masks (FMs) that also generalize well to unseen subjects and we search the value preference space in an attempt to analyze its impact in respect to optimization and generalization. Our results show that by fusing the periocular biometric with the face, we can achieve higher recognition accuracies than using the two biometric modalities independently. Our results also show that our GEB techniques are able to achieve higher recognition rates than the baseline methods, while using significantly fewer features. In addition, by incorporating machine learning, we were able to create FMs that also generalize well to unseen subjects and use less than 50% of the extracted features. Finally, by searching the value preference space, we were able to determine which weights were most effective in terms of optimization and generalization

A survey of wearable biometric recognition systems

The growing popularity of wearable devices is leading to new ways to interact with the environment, with other smart devices, and with other people. Wearables equipped with an array of sensors are able to capture the owner's physiological and behavioural traits, thus are well suited for biometric authentication to control other devices or access digital services. However, wearable biometrics have substantial differences from traditional biometrics for computer systems, such as fingerprints, eye features, or voice. In this article, we discuss these differences and analyse how researchers are approaching the wearable biometrics field. We review and provide a categorization of wearable sensors useful for capturing biometric signals. We analyse the computational cost of the different signal processing techniques, an important practical factor in constrained devices such as wearables. Finally, we review and classify the most recent proposals in the field of wearable biometrics in terms of the structure of the biometric system proposed, their experimental setup, and their results. We also present a critique of experimental issues such as evaluation and feasibility aspects, and offer some final thoughts on research directions that need attention in future work.This work was partially supported by the MINECO grant TIN2013-46469-R (SPINY) and the CAM Grant S2013/ICE-3095 (CIBERDINE

A Survey of Wearable Biometric Recognition Systems

The growing popularity of wearable devices is leading to new ways to interact with the environment, with other smart devices, and with other people. Wearables equipped with an array of sensors are able to capture the owner’s physiological and behavioural traits, thus are well suited for biometric authentication to control other devices or access digital services. However, wearable biometrics have substantial differences from traditional biometrics for computer systems, such as fingerprints, eye features, or voice. In this article, we discuss these differences and analyse how researchers are approaching the wearable biometrics field. We review and provide a categorization of wearable sensors useful for capturing biometric signals. We analyse the computational cost of the different signal processing techniques, an important practical factor in constrained devices such as wearables. Finally, we review and classify the most recent proposals in the field of wearable biometrics in terms of the structure of the biometric system proposed, their experimental setup, and their results. We also present a critique of experimental issues such as evaluation and feasibility aspects, and offer some final thoughts on research directions that need attention in future work

Identification and Security Implications of Biometrics

The usage of biometrics has become more frequent over the past couple of decades, notably due to technological advancements. Evolving technology in the field of biometrics has also led to increased accuracy of associated software, which have provided the opportunity to use a multitude of different human characteristics for identification and/or verification purposes. The current study assessed the usage of biometrics in casinos, hospitals, and law enforcement agencies using a survey methodology. Results indicated that privacy concerns related to the use of biometrics may not be as prevalent as indicated in the literature. Additionally, results indicated that the utilization of biometrics has led to increased accuracy in identification and verification processes, led to enhanced security, and would be highly recommended to other institutions. Information obtained from the literature notes the racial bias in facial recognition technologies due to algorithmic development based solely upon features of Caucasian individuals. Efforts need to be made to create facial recognition algorithms that are more racially and ethnically diverse