Investigation of iris recognition in the visible spectrum

mong the biometric systems that have been developed so far, iris recognition systems have emerged as being one of the most reliable. In iris recognition, most of the research was conducted on operation under near infrared illumination. For unconstrained scenarios of iris recognition systems, the iris images are captured under visible light spectrum and therefore incorporate various types of imperfections. In this thesis the merits of fusing information from various sources for improving the state of the art accuracies of colour iris recognition systems is evaluated. An investigation of how fundamentally different fusion strategies can increase the degree of choice available in achieving certain performance criteria is conducted. Initially, simple fusion mechanisms are employed to increase the accuracy of an iris recognition system and then more complex fusion architectures are elaborated to further enhance the biometric system’s accuracy. In particular, the design process of the iris recognition system with reduced constraints is carried out using three different fusion approaches: multi-algorithmic, texture and colour fusion and multiple classifier systems. In the first approach, one novel iris feature extraction methodology is proposed and a multi-algorithmic iris recognition system using score fusion, composed of 3 individual systems, is benchmarked. In the texture and colour fusion approach, the advantages of fusing information from the iris texture with data extracted from the eye colour are illustrated. Finally, the multiple classifier systems approach investigates how the robustness and practicability of an iris recognition system operating on visible spectrum images can be enhanced by training individual classifiers on different iris features. Besides the various fusion techniques explored, an iris segmentation algorithm is proposed and a methodology for finding which colour channels from a colour space reveal the most discriminant information from the iris texture is introduced. The contributions presented in this thesis indicate that iris recognition systems that operate on visible spectrum images can be designed to operate with an accuracy required by a particular application scenario. Also, the iris recognition systems developed in the present study are suitable for mobile and embedded implementations

A robust sclera segmentation algorithm

Sclera segmentation is shown to be of significant importance for eye and iris biometrics. However, sclera segmentation has not been extensively researched as a separate topic, but mainly summarized as a component of a broader task. This paper proposes a novel sclera segmentation algorithm for colour images which operates at pixel-level. Exploring various colour spaces, the proposed approach is robust to image noise and different gaze directions. The algorithm’s robustness is enhanced by a two-stage classifier. At the first stage, a set of simple classifiers is employed, while at the second stage, a neural network classifier operates on the probabilities’ space generated by the classifiers at stage 1. The proposed method was ranked the 1st in Sclera Segmentation Benchmarking Competition 2015, part of BTAS 2015, with a precision of 95.05% corresponding to a recall of 94.56%

Food Chilling Methods and CFD Analysis of a Refrigeration Cabinet as a Case Study

This chapter presents the most significant facts about food chilling. For food chilling, the chilling medium in mechanically cooled chillers may be air, water or another secondary cooling agent (slurry ice), or metal surfaces (heat exchangers). Ice chilling is also presented. CFD simulation is applied to a vertical display cabinet with four shelves. In order to evaluate the temperature gradient, the following stages are taken into account: preprocessing—geometry set-up and design of the discretization scheme; processing—introduction of the boundary conditions and calculation; and post-processing—visualization of the velocity and temperature fields

Towards anomaly detection for increased security in multibiometric systems: spoofing-resistant 1-median fusion eliminating outliers

Multibiometrics aims at improving biometric security in presence of spoofing attempts, but exposes a larger availability of points of attack. Standard fusion rules have been shown to be highly sensitive to spoofing attempts – even in case of a single fake instance only. This paper presents a novel spoofing-resistant fusion scheme proposing the detection and elimination of anomalous fusion input in an ensemble of evidence with liveness information. This approach aims at making multibiometric systems more resistant to presentation attacks by modeling the typical behaviour of human surveillance operators detecting anomalies as employed in many decision support systems. It is shown to improve security, while retaining the high accuracy level of standard fusion approaches on the latest Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition (LivDet) 2013 dataset