8,873 research outputs found
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%
Converting normal insulators into topological insulators via tuning orbital levels
Tuning the spin-orbit coupling strength via foreign element doping and/or
modifying bonding strength via strain engineering are the major routes to
convert normal insulators to topological insulators. We here propose an
alternative strategy to realize topological phase transition by tuning the
orbital level. Following this strategy, our first-principles calculations
demonstrate that a topological phase transition in some cubic perovskite-type
compounds CsGeBr and CsSnBr could be facilitated by carbon
substitutional doping. Such unique topological phase transition predominantly
results from the lower orbital energy of the carbon dopant, which can pull down
the conduction bands and even induce band inversion. Beyond conventional
approaches, our finding of tuning the orbital level may greatly expand the
range of topologically nontrivial materials
Stable nontrivial Z2 topology in ultrathin Bi (111) films: a first-principles study
Recently, there have been intense efforts in searching for new topological
insulator (TI) materials. Based on first-principles calculations, we find that
all the ultrathin Bi (111) films are characterized by a nontrivial Z2 number
independent of the film thickness, without the odd-even oscillation of
topological triviality as commonly perceived. The stable nontrivial Z2 topology
is retained by the concurrent band gap inversions at multiple
time-reversal-invariant k-points and associated with the intermediate
inter-bilayer coupling of the multi-bilayer Bi film. Our calculations further
indicate that the presence of metallic surface states in thick Bi(111) films
can be effectively removed by surface adsorption.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
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