Fusion of facial regions using color information in a forensic scenario

Comunicación presentada en: 18th Iberoamerican Congress on Pattern Recognition, CIARP 2013; Havana; Cuba; 20-23 November 2013The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41827-3_50This paper reports an analysis of the benefits of using color information on a region-based face recognition system. Three different color spaces are analysed (RGB, YCbCr, lαβ) in a very challenging scenario matching good quality mugshot images against video surveillance images. This scenario is of special interest for forensics, where examiners carry out a comparison of two face images using the global information of the faces, but paying special attention to each individual facial region (eyes, nose, mouth, etc.). This work analyses the discriminative power of 15 facial regions comparing both the grayscale and color information. Results show a significant improvement of performance when fusing several regions of the face compared to just using the whole face image. A further improvement of performance is achieved when color information is consideredThis work has been partially supported by contract with Spanish Guardia Civil and projects BBfor2 (FP7-ITN-238803), bio-Challenge (TEC2009-11186), Bio Shield (TEC2012-34881), Contexts (S2009/TIC-1485), TeraSense (CSD2008-00068) and "Cátedra UAM-Telefónica

A study on the effect of the asymmetry on real capacitated vehicle routing problems

Matrices with distances between pairs of locations are essential for solving vehicle routing problems like the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and others. This work deals with the complex reality of transportation networks and asymmetry. Through a series of comprehensive and thorough computational and statistical experiments we study the effect that many factors like asymmetry, geographical location of the depot and clients, demand, territory and maximum vehicle capacity have in the solution of CVRP instances. We examine both classical heuristics as well as current state-of-the-art metaheuristics and show that these methods are seriously affected by the studied factors from a solution time and quality of solutions perspective. We systematically compare the solutions obtained in the symmetric scenario with those obtained in the real asymmetric case at a quantitative as well as a qualitative level, with the objective of carefully measuring and understanding the differences between both cases. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.The authors are indebted to Keld Helsgaun, Stefan Ropke and especially to Yuichi Nagata for their kind help, collaboration and for facilitating the binaries of their algorithms. This work is partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, under the project "SMPA-Advanced Parallel Multiobjective Sequencing: Practical and Theoretical Advances" with reference DPI2008-03511/DPI. The authors should also thank the IMPIVA-Institute for the Small and Medium Valencian Enterprise, for the project TASER with reference IMDEEA/2011/142.Rodríguez Villalobos, A.; Ruiz García, R. (2012). A study on the effect of the asymmetry on real capacitated vehicle routing problems. Computers and Operations Research. 39(9):2142-2151. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cor.2011.10.023S2142215139

Preprocessing and feature selection for improved sensor interoperability in online biometric signature verification

Under a IEEE Open Access Publishing Agreement.Due to the technological evolution and the increasing popularity of smartphones, people can access an application using authentication based on biometric approaches from many different devices. Device interoperability is a very challenging problem for biometrics, which needs to be further studied. In this paper, we focus on interoperability device compensation for online signature verification since this biometric trait is gaining a significant interest in banking and commercial sector in the last years. The proposed approach is based on two main stages. The first one is a preprocessing stage where data acquired from different devices are processed in order to normalize the signals in similar ranges. The second one is based on feature selection taking into account the device interoperability case, in order to select to select features which are robust in these conditions. This proposed approach has been successfully applied in a similar way to two common system approaches in online signature verification, i.e., a global features-based system and a time functions-based system. Experiments are carried out using Biosecure DS2 (Wacom device) and DS3 (Personal Digital Assistant mobile device) dynamic signature data sets which take into account multisession and two different scenarios emulating real operation conditions. The performance of the proposed global features-based and time functions-based systems applying the two main stages considered in this paper have provided an average relative improvement of performance of 60.3% and 26.5% Equal Error Rate (EER), respectively, for random forgeries cases, compared with baseline systems. Finally, a fusion of the proposed systems has achieved a further significant improvement for the device interoperability problem, especially for skilled forgeries. In this case, the proposed fusion system has achieved an average relative improvement of 27.7% EER compared with the best performance of time functions-based system. These results prove the robustness of the proposed approach and open the door for future works using devices as smartphones or tablets, commonly used nowadays.This work was supported in part by the Project Bio-Shield under Grant TEC2012-34881, in part by Cecabank e-BioFirma Contract, and in part by Catedra UAM-Telefonic

Increasing the Robustness of Biometric Templates for Dynamic Signature Biometric Systems

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, 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 component of this work in other works. R. Tolosana, R. Vera-Rodriguez, J. Ortega-Garcia and J. Fierrez, "Increasing the robustness of biometric templates for dynamic signature biometric systems," Security Technology (ICCST), 2015 International Carnahan Conference on, Taipei, 2015, pp. 229-234. doi: 10.1109/CCST.2015.7389687Due to the high deployment of devices such as smartphones and tablets and their increasing popularity in our society, the use of biometric traits in commercial and banking applications through these novel devices as an easy, quick and reliable way to perform payments is rapidly increasing. The handwritten signature is one of the most socially accepted biometric traits in these sectors due to the fact that it has been used in financial and legal transitions for centuries. In this paper we focus on dynamic signature verification systems. Nowadays, most of the state-of-the-art systems are based on extracting information contained in the X and Y spatial position coordinates of the signing process, which is stored in the biometric templates. However, it is critical to protect this sensible information of the users signatures against possible external attacks that would allow criminals to perform direct attacks to a biometric system or carry out high quality forgeries of the users signatures. Following this problem, the goal of this work is to study the performance of the system in two cases: first, an optimal time functions-based system taking into account the information related to X and Y coordinates and pressure, which is the common practice (i.e. Standard System). Second, we study an extreme case not considering information related to X, Y coordinates and their derivatives on the biometric system (i.e. Secure System), which would be a much more robust system against attacks, as this critical information would not be stored anywhere. The experimental work is carried out using e-BioSign database which makes use of 5 devices in total. The systems considered in this work are based on Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), an elastic measure over the selected time functions. Sequential Forward Features Selection (SFFS) is applied as a reliable way to obtain an optimal time functions vector over a development subset of users of the database. The results obtained over the evaluation subset of users of the database show a similar performance for both Standard and Secure Systems. Therefore, the use of a Secure System can be useful in some applications such as banking in order to avoid the lost of important user information against possible external attacks.This work was supported in part by the Project Bio-Shield (TEC2012-34881), in part by Cecabank e-BioFirma Contract, in part by the BEAT Project (FP7-SEC-284989) and in part by Catedra UAM-Telefonica

Update Strategies for HMM-Based Dynamic Signature Biometric Systems

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, 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 component of this work in other works. [R. Tolosana, R. Vera-Rodriguez, J. Ortega-Garcia and J. Fierrez, "Update strategies for HMM-based dynamic signature biometric systems," Information Forensics and Security (WIFS), 2015 IEEE International Workshop on, Rome, 2015, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1109/WIFS.2015.7368583Biometric authentication on devices such as smart- phones and tablets has increased significantly in the last years. One of the most acceptable and increasing traits is the handwrit- ing signature as it has been used in financial and legal agreements scenarios for over a century. Nowadays, it is frequent to sign in banking and commercial areas on digitizing tablets. For these reasons, it is necessary to consider a new scenario where the number of training signatures available to generate the user template is variable and besides it has to be taken into account the lap of time between them (inter-session variability). In this work we focus on dynamic signature verification. The main goal of this work is to study system configuration update strategies of time functions-based systems such as Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). Therefore, two different cases have been considered. First, the usual case of having an HMM-based system with a fixed configuration (i.e. Baseline System). Second, an HMM-based and GMM-based sys- tems whose configurations are optimized regarding the number of training signatures available to generate the user template. The experimental work has been carried out using an extended version of the Signature Long-Term database taking into account skilled and random or zero-effort forgeries. This database is comprised of a total of 6 different sessions distributed in a 15-month time span. Analyzing the results, the Proposed Systems achieve an average absolute improvement of 4.6% in terms of EER(%) for skilled forgeries cases compared to the Baseline System whereas the average absolute improvement for the random forgeries cases is of 2.7% EER. These results show the importance of optimizing the configuration of the systems compared to a fixed configuration system when the number of training signatures available to generate the user template increases.This work was supported in part by the Project Bio-Shield (TEC2012-34881), in part by Cecabank e-BioFirma Contract, in part by the BEAT Project (FP7-SEC-284989) and in part by Catedra UAM-Telefonica

José María Blanco White, heterodoxia y exilio

El presente estudio es un intento de acercamiento hermenéutico sobre la obra del insigne español José María Blanco White. El aspecto principal en que se centra es la ausencia deliberada y el ocultamiento del canon español. Procura fijar conceptos a través de las investigaciones de Juan Goytisolo y Eduardo Subirats con el fin de encontrar un adecuado método de análisis. El objetivo es encontrar la relevancia e interacción entre la vida, la obra y la auto ficción en el autor. Las obras tenidas en cuenta de José María Blanco White son: Cartas de España, Autografía de Blanco White y El Español.Departamento de Literatura Española y Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura ComparadaGrado en Español: Lengua y Literatur

Morteros fotocatalíticos: análisis de su autolimpieza en función del tipo de cemento y rugosidad superficial.

En este Trabajo fin de master se explicará el funcionamiento de la fotocatálisis que presentan los materiales con adición de óxido de titanio en tamaño de nanopartículas, el cual les confiere ciertas cualidades especiales. Una vez conocido el funcionamiento de la fotocatálisis se estudiará la influencia de ciertos factores, que no han sido tratados en profundidad hasta el momento en los materiales en base cemento, para mejorar las propiedades autolimpiantes, como son; el tipo de cemento o la rugosidad superficial, ya que sin duda, la composición que tenga el cemento y la rugosidad que se le confiera en los acabados, influirá en el comportamiento autolimpiante, por ello se hace necesario un estudio en el que se evaluarán que cementos proporcionan una mayor efectividad en función de sus composición y que rugosidad superficial funciona mejor en la autolimpieza, debido a esto se estudiarán morteros con acabados lisos y con distintas rugosidades hasta 1.5mm de irregularidad. Para poder realizar este estudio se elaborará una caracterización de los morteros, que se utilizarán en la evaluación de las cualidades autolimpiantes, comparándolos con otros de idéntica dosificación, pero sin adición de oxido de titanio. Posteriormente sabiendo cuantitativamente cuales son sus características y si la adición de oxido de titanio modifica alguna de sus propiedades, pasar a evaluar sus características autolimpiantes, esto se hará, añadiendo a las probetas perfectamente curadas por inmersión durante mas de 28 días, distintos colorantes en disoluciones acuosa, como son la Rodamina B y el Azul de metileno. Una vez coloreadas las probetas, se medirá la degradación del color mediante un aparato conocido como espectrofotómetro, el cual nos dirá la variación de color en escala CIELAB. Con estos datos se podrá cuantificar de una manera más o menos precisa cuales son los cementos que presentan unas cualidades autolimpiantes mejores y cuales son los acabados superficiales, que presentan mayor autolimpieza, datos importantes de conocer a la hora de fabricar elementos a los cuales se les quiera dotar de este tipo de cualidades

La escritura creativa como proceso de aprendizaje

El propósito del siguiente trabajo es poner de manifiesto un punto de vista particular acerca de la escritura y la lectura, dentro de las clases de Literatura Universal durante el Bachillerato, en el apartado de Escritura Creativa. La cuestión es si el conocimiento de ciertas herramientas de cambio facilita el acceso a un nuevo status lector en el alumno, y si a través de la escritura creativa se posibilita la comprensión e interpretación de la realidad, transformando a los individuos implicados.The aim of this work is to outline a point of view about the writing and reading in Universal Literature classes during the Baccalaureate as creative writing. The question is if the knowledge of creative tools provides a new reader status, and if it is possible to understand and translate the reality through creative writing, transforming the involved individuals.Departamento de Literatura Española y Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura ComparadaDepartamento de Didáctica de la Lengua y LiteraturaMáster en Profesor de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria y Bachillerato, Formación Profesional y Enseñanzas de Idioma

La modalidad a distancia para la educación tecnológica de postgrado: ¿es de interés para los egresados?

Con la inclusión de las tecnologías de información y comunicación en el ámbito educativo, el proceso de enseñanza aprendizaje logra penetrar a través de la virtualidad en cualquier espacio humano. Son diversas las modalidades educativas que coexisten en la educación superior en México, de manera particular se destaca la educación a distancia en los postgrados, la cual representa una alternativa para la cobertura y la formación educativa en los niveles de licenciatura y postgrado, y por ende, para la educación tecnológica. La presente investigación tuvo el propósito de analizar algunos factores relevantes para la implementación de dicha modalidad educativa en la especialidad en electrónica del Instituto Tecnológico de Veracruz, en México

e-BioSign Tool: Towards Scientific Assessment of Dynamic Signatures under Forensic Conditions

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, 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 component of this work in other works. R. Vera-Rodriguez, J. Fierrez, J. Ortega-Garcia, A. Acien and R. Tolosana, "e-BioSign tool: Towards scientific assessment of dynamic signatures under forensic conditions," 2015 IEEE 7th International Conference on Biometrics Theory, Applications and Systems (BTAS), Arlington, VA, 2015, pp. 1-6. doi: 10.1109/BTAS.2015.7358756This paper presents a new tool specifically designed to carry out dynamic signature forensic analysis and give sci- entific support to forensic handwriting examiners (FHEs). Traditionally FHEs have performed forensic analysis of paper-based signatures for court cases, but with the rapid evolution of the technology, nowadays they are being asked to carry out analysis based on signatures acquired by digi- tizing tablets more and more often. In some cases, an option followed has been to obtain a paper impression of these sig- natures and carry out a traditional analysis, but there are many deficiencies in this approach regarding the low spa- tial resolution of some devices compared to original off-line signatures and also the fact that the dynamic information, which has been proved to be very discriminative by the bio- metric community, is lost and not taken into account at all. The tool we present in this paper allows the FHEs to carry out a forensic analysis taking into account both the tra- ditional off-line information normally used in paper-based signature analysis, and also the dynamic information of the signatures. Additionally, the tool incorporates two impor- tant functionalities, the first is the provision of statistical support to the analysis by including population statistics for genuine and forged signatures for some selected features, and the second is the incorporation of an automatic dy- namic signature matcher, from which a likelihood ratio (LR) can be obtained from the matching comparison between the known and questioned signatures under analysis.This work was supported in part by the Project Bio-Shield (TEC2012-34881), in part by Cecabank e-BioFirma Contract, in part by the BEAT Project (FP7-SEC-284989) and in part by Catedra UAM-Telefonica