Offline Handwritten Signature Verification - Literature Review

The area of Handwritten Signature Verification has been broadly researched in the last decades, but remains an open research problem. The objective of signature verification systems is to discriminate if a given signature is genuine (produced by the claimed individual), or a forgery (produced by an impostor). This has demonstrated to be a challenging task, in particular in the offline (static) scenario, that uses images of scanned signatures, where the dynamic information about the signing process is not available. Many advancements have been proposed in the literature in the last 5-10 years, most notably the application of Deep Learning methods to learn feature representations from signature images. In this paper, we present how the problem has been handled in the past few decades, analyze the recent advancements in the field, and the potential directions for future research.Comment: Accepted to the International Conference on Image Processing Theory, Tools and Applications (IPTA 2017

Highly Efficient Regression for Scalable Person Re-Identification

Existing person re-identification models are poor for scaling up to large data required in real-world applications due to: (1) Complexity: They employ complex models for optimal performance resulting in high computational cost for training at a large scale; (2) Inadaptability: Once trained, they are unsuitable for incremental update to incorporate any new data available. This work proposes a truly scalable solution to re-id by addressing both problems. Specifically, a Highly Efficient Regression (HER) model is formulated by embedding the Fisher's criterion to a ridge regression model for very fast re-id model learning with scalable memory/storage usage. Importantly, this new HER model supports faster than real-time incremental model updates therefore making real-time active learning feasible in re-id with human-in-the-loop. Extensive experiments show that such a simple and fast model not only outperforms notably the state-of-the-art re-id methods, but also is more scalable to large data with additional benefits to active learning for reducing human labelling effort in re-id deployment

Kinship Verification from Videos using Spatio-Temporal Texture Features and Deep Learning

Automatic kinship verification using facial images is a relatively new and challenging research problem in computer vision. It consists in automatically predicting whether two persons have a biological kin relation by examining their facial attributes. While most of the existing works extract shallow handcrafted features from still face images, we approach this problem from spatio-temporal point of view and explore the use of both shallow texture features and deep features for characterizing faces. Promising results, especially those of deep features, are obtained on the benchmark UvA-NEMO Smile database. Our extensive experiments also show the superiority of using videos over still images, hence pointing out the important role of facial dynamics in kinship verification. Furthermore, the fusion of the two types of features (i.e. shallow spatio-temporal texture features and deep features) shows significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 7 page