What else does your biometric data reveal? A survey on soft biometrics

International audienceRecent research has explored the possibility of extracting ancillary information from primary biometric traits, viz., face, fingerprints, hand geometry and iris. This ancillary information includes personal attributes such as gender, age, ethnicity, hair color, height, weight, etc. Such attributes are known as soft biometrics and have applications in surveillance and indexing biometric databases. These attributes can be used in a fusion framework to improve the matching accuracy of a primary biometric system (e.g., fusing face with gender information), or can be used to generate qualitative descriptions of an individual (e.g., "young Asian female with dark eyes and brown hair"). The latter is particularly useful in bridging the semantic gap between human and machine descriptions of biometric data. In this paper, we provide an overview of soft biometrics and discuss some of the techniques that have been proposed to extract them from image and video data. We also introduce a taxonomy for organizing and classifying soft biometric attributes, and enumerate the strengths and limitations of these attributes in the context of an operational biometric system. Finally, we discuss open research problems in this field. This survey is intended for researchers and practitioners in the field of biometrics

Support vector learning for gender classification using audio and visual cues

The paper investigated gender classification using Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The visual (thumbnail frontal face) and the audio (features from speech data) cues were considered for designing the classifier. Three different representations of the data, namely, raw data, principal component analysis (PCA) and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) were used for the experimentation with visual signal. For speech, mel-cepstral coefficient and pitch were used for the experimentation. It was found that the best overall classification rates obtained using SVM for the visual and speech data were 95.31% and 100%, respectively, on data set collected in laboratory environment

Support Vector Learning for Gender Classification Using Audio and Visual Cues: A Comparison

Computer vision systems for monitoring people and collecting valuable demographics in a social environment will play an increasingly important role in enhancing user’s experience and can significantly improve the intelligibility of a human computer interaction (HCI) system. For example, a robust gender classification system is expected to provide a basis for passive surveillance and access to a smart building using demographic information or can provide valuable consumer statistics in a public place. The option of an audio cue in addition to the visual cue promises a robust solution with high accuracy and ease-of-use in human computer interaction systems. This paper investigates the use of Support Vector Machines(SVMs) for the purpose of gender classification. Both visual (thumbnail frontal face) and audio (features from speech data) cues were considered for designing the classifier and the performance obtained by using each cue was compared. The performance of the SVM was compared with that of two simple classifiers namely, the nearest prototype neighbor and the k-nearest neighbor on all feature sets. It was found that the SVM outperformed the other two classifiers on all datasets. The best overall classification rates obtained using the SVM for the visual and speech data were 95. 31% and 100%, respectively