Predicting a person's gender based on the iris texture has been explored by several researchers. This paper considers several dimensions of experimental work on this problem, including person-disjoint train and test, and the effect of cosmetics on eyelash occlusion and imperfect segmentation. We also consider the use of multi-layer perceptron and convolutional neural networks as classifiers, comparing the use of data-driven and hand-crafted features. Our results suggest that the gender-from-iris problem is more difficult than has so far been appreciated. Estimating accuracy using a mean of N person-disjoint train and test partitions, and considering the effect of makeup - a combination of experimental conditions not present in any previous work - we find a much weaker ability to predict gender-from-iris texture than has been suggested in previous work.
The extraction of ancillary information from biometric traits is known as . As defined by Dantcheva al @cite_14 , "[s]oft biometric traits are physical, behavioral, or material accessories, which are associated with an individual, and which can be useful for recognizing an individual."
@cite_14
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Recent 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, and so on. 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 the 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 the image and the 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. Biometric recognition refers to the automated recognition of individuals based on their biological and behavioral characteristics such as fingerprint, face, iris, and voice. The first scientific paper on automated fingerprint matching was published by Mitchell Trauring in the journal Nature in 1963. The first objective of this paper is to document the significant progress that has been achieved in the field of biometric recognition in the past 50 years since Trauring's landmark paper. This progress has enabled current state-of-the-art biometric systems to accurately recognize individuals based on biometric trait(s) acquired under controlled environmental conditions from cooperative users. Despite this progress, a number of challenging issues continue to inhibit the full potential of biometrics to automatically recognize humans. The second objective of this paper is to enlist such challenges, analyze the solutions proposed to overcome them, and highlight the research opportunities in this field. One of the foremost challenges is the design of robust algorithms for representing and matching biometric samples obtained from uncooperative subjects under unconstrained environmental conditions (e.g., recognizing faces in a crowd). In addition, fundamental questions such as the distinctiveness and persistence of biometric traits need greater attention. Problems related to the security of biometric data and robustness of the biometric system against spoofing and obfuscation attacks, also remain unsolved. Finally, larger system-level issues like usability, user privacy concerns, integration with the end application, and return on investment have not been adequately addressed. Unlocking the full potential of biometrics through inter-disciplinary research in the above areas will not only lead to widespread adoption of this promising technology, but will also result in wider user acceptance and societ al impact. Establishing identity is becoming critical in our vastly interconnected society. Questions such as "Is she really who she claims to be?," "Is this person authorized to use this facility?," or "Is he in the watchlist posted by the government?" are routinely being posed in a variety of scenarios ranging from issuing a driver's license to gaining entry into a country. The need for reliable user authentication techniques has increased in the wake of heightened concerns about security and rapid advancements in networking, communication, and mobility. Biometrics, described as the science of recognizing an individual based on his or her physical or behavioral traits, is beginning to gain acceptance as a legitimate method for determining an individual's identity. Biometric systems have now been deployed in various commercial, civilian, and forensic applications as a means of establishing identity. In this paper, we provide an overview of biometrics and discuss some of the salient research issues that need to be addressed for making biometric technology an effective tool for providing information security. The primary contribution of this overview includes: 1) examining applications where biometric scan solve issues pertaining to information security; 2) enumerating the fundamental challenges encountered by biometric systems in real-world applications; and 3) discussing solutions to address the problems of scalability and security in large-scale authentication systems. Information describing the materials that make up scene constituents provides invaluable context that can lead to a better understanding of images. We would like to obtain such material information at every pixel, in arbitrary images, regardless of the objects involved. In this paper, we introduce visual material traits to achieve this. Material traits, such as "shiny," or "woven," encode the appearance of characteristic material properties. We learn convolution kernels in an unsupervised setting to recognize complex material trait appearances at each pixel. Unlike previous methods, our framework explicitly avoids influence from object-specific information. We may, therefore, accurately recognize material traits regardless of the object exhibiting them. Our results show that material traits are discriminative and can be accurately recognized. We demonstrate the use of material traits in material recognition and image segmentation. To our knowledge, this is the first method to extract and use such per-pixel material information. A new multi-modal biometric authentication approach using gait signals and fingerprint images as biometric traits is proposed. The individual comparison scores derived from the gait and fingers are normalized using four methods (min-max, z-score, median absolute deviation, tangent hyperbolic) and then four fusion approaches (simple sum, user-weighting, maximum score and minimum core) are applied. Gait samples are obtained by using a dedicated accelerometer sensor attached to the hip. The proposed method is evaluated using 7200 fingerprint images and gait samples. Fingerprints are collected by a capacitive line sensor, an optical sensor with total internal reflection and a touch-less optical sensor. The fusion results of these two biometrics show an improved performance and a large step closer for user authentication on mobile devices. Biometric recognition is an integral component of modern identity management and access control systems. Due to the strong and permanent link between individuals and their biometric traits, exposure of enrolled users? biometric information to adversaries can seriously compromise biometric system security and user privacy. Numerous techniques have been proposed for biometric template protection over the last 20 years. While these techniques are theoretically sound, they seldom guarantee the desired noninvertibility, revocability, and nonlinkability properties without significantly degrading the recognition performance. The objective of this work is to analyze the factors contributing to this performance divide and highlight promising research directions to bridge this gap. The design of invariant biometric representations remains a fundamental problem, despite recent attempts to address this issue through feature adaptation schemes. The difficulty in estimating the statistical distribution of biometric features not only hinders the development of better template protection algorithms but also diminishes the ability to quantify the noninvertibility and nonlinkability of existing algorithms. Finally, achieving nonlinkability without the use of external secrets (e.g., passwords) continues to be a challenging proposition. Further research on the above issues is required to cross the chasm between theory and practice in biometric ?template protection. Many cultural traits exhibit volatile dynamics, commonly dubbed fashions or fads. Here we show that realistic fashion-like dynamics emerge spontaneously if individuals can copy others' preferences for cultural traits as well as traits themselves. We demonstrate this dynamics in simple mathematical models of the diffusion, and subsequent abandonment, of a single cultural trait which individuals may or may not prefer. We then simulate the coevolution between many cultural traits and the associated preferences, reproducing power-law frequency distributions of cultural traits (most traits are adopted by few individuals for a short time, and very few by many for a long time), as well as correlations between the rate of increase and the rate of decrease of traits (traits that increase rapidly in popularity are also abandoned quickly and vice versa). We also establish that alternative theories, that fashions result from individuals signaling their social status, or from individuals randomly copying each other, do not satisfactorily reproduce these empirical observations. Biometric recognition offers a reliable solution to the problem of user authentication in identity management systems. With the widespread deployment of biometric systems in various applications, there are increasing concerns about the security and privacy of biometric technology. Public acceptance of biometrics technology will depend on the ability of system designers to demonstrate that these systems are robust, have low error rates, and are tamper proof. We present a high-level categorization of the various vulnerabilities of a biometric system and discuss countermeasures that have been proposed to address these vulnerabilities. In particular, we focus on biometric template security which is an important issue because, unlike passwords and tokens, compromised biometric templates cannot be revoked and reissued. Protecting the template is a challenging task due to intrauser variability in the acquired biometric traits. We present an overview of various biometric template protection schemes and discuss their advantages and limitations in terms of security, revocability, and impact on matching accuracy. A template protection scheme with provable security and acceptable recognition performance has thus far remained elusive. Development of such a scheme is crucial as biometric systems are beginning to proliferate into the core physical and information infrastructure of our society. In two vignette studies we examined beliefs about the nonverbal behavior and communication skills associated with high and low social power. Power was defined as both a trait (personality dominance) and a role (rank within an organization). Seventy nonverbal behaviors and skills were examined. Both Study 1 (a within-participants design) and Study 2 (a between-participants design) yielded highly similar results. Significant differences emerged for 35 of the 70 behaviors. The gender of the target individuals did not moderate beliefs about the relation of nonverbal behavior and power. The development of the wireless body area sensor network (BASN) is imperative for modern telemedicine and m-health, but security remains a formidable challenge yet to be resolved. As nodes of BASN are expected to be interconnected on or in the human body, the body itself can form an inherently secure communication pathway that is unavailable to all other kinds of wireless networks. This article explores the use of this conduit in the security mechanism of BASN; that is, by a biometrics approach that uses an intrinsic characteristic of the human body as the authentication identity or the means of securing the distribution of a cipher key to secure inter-BASN communications. The method was tested on 99 subjects with 838 segments of simultaneous recordings of electrocardiogram and photoplethysmogram. By using the interpulse interval (IPI) as the biometric trait, the system achieved a minimum half total error rate of 2.58 percent when the IPIs measured from signals, which were sampled at 1000 Hz, were coded into 128-bit binary sequences. The study opens up a few key issues for future investigation, including compensation schemes for the asynchrony of different channels, coding schemes, and other suitable biometric traits. HighlightsPresentation of the new freely available TUM Gait from Audio, Image and Depth (GAID) database.Advancing gait based person identification by multimodal feature extraction.Gait based recognition of person traits: gender, age, height, shoe type.Baseline results and fusion for gait recognition using RGB, depth and audio. Recognizing people by the way they walk-also known as gait recognition-has been studied extensively in the recent past. Recent gait recognition methods solely focus on data extracted from an RGB video stream. With this work, we provide a means for multimodal gait recognition, by introducing the freely available TUM Gait from Audio, Image and Depth (GAID) database. This database simultaneously contains RGB video, depth and audio. With 305 people in three variations, it is one of the largest to-date. To further investigate challenges of time variation, a subset of 32 people is recorded a second time. We define standardized experimental setups for both person identification and for the assessment of the soft biometrics age, gender, height, and shoe type. For all defined experiments, we present several baseline results on all available modalities. These effectively demonstrate multimodal fusion being beneficial to gait recognition. Biometrics is commonly used in many automated verification systems offering several advantages over traditional verification methods. Since biometric features are associated with individuals, their leakage will violate individuals’ privacy, which can cause serious and continued problems as the biometric data from a person are irreplaceable. To protect the biometric data containing privacy information, a number of privacy-preserving biometric schemes (PPBSs) have been developed over the last decade, but they have various drawbacks. The aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive overview of the existing PPBSs and give guidance for future privacy-preserving biometric research. In particular, we explain the functional mechanisms of popular PPBSs and present the state-of-the-art privacy-preserving biometric methods based on these mechanisms. Furthermore, we discuss the drawbacks of the existing PPBSs and point out the challenges and future research directions in PPBSs. The authors consider processes on social networks that can potentially involve three factors: homophily, or the formation of social ties due to matching individual traits; social contagion, also known as social influence; and the causal effect of an individual’s covariates on his or her behavior or other measurable responses. The authors show that generically, all of these are confounded with each other. Distinguishing them from one another requires strong assumptions on the parametrization of the social process or on the adequacy of the covariates used (or both). In particular the authors demonstrate, with simple examples, that asymmetries in regression coefficients cannot identify causal effects and that very simple models of imitation (a form of social contagion) can produce substantial correlations between an individual’s enduring traits and his or her choices, even when there is no intrinsic affinity between them. The authors also suggest some possible constructive responses to these results. Biometrics are an important and widely used class of methods for identity verification and access control. Biometrics are attractive because they are inherent properties of an individual. They need not be remembered like passwords and are not easily lost or forged like identifying documents. At the same time, biometrics are fundamentally noisy and irreplaceable. There are always slight variations among the measurements of a given biometric, and, unlike passwords or identification numbers, biometrics are derived from physical characteristics that cannot easily be changed. The proliferation of biometric usage raises critical privacy and security concerns that, due to the noisy nature of biometrics, cannot be addressed using standard cryptographic methods. In this article, we present an overview of secure biometrics, also referred to as biometric template protection, an emerging class of methods that address these concerns. Recent years have seen an exponential growth in the use of various biometric technologies for trusted automatic recognition of humans. With the rapid adaptation of biometric systems, there is a growing concern that biometric technologies may compromise the privacy and anonymity of individuals. Unlike credit cards and passwords, which can be revoked and reissued when compromised, biometrics are permanently associated with a user and cannot be replaced. To prevent the theft of biometric patterns, it is desirable to modify them through revocable and noninvertible transformations to produce cancelable biometric templates. In this article, we provide an overview of various cancelable biometric schemes for biometric template protection. We discuss the merits and drawbacks of available cancelable biometric systems and identify promising avenues of research in this rapidly evolving field. The earmarks are usual evidences in many real criminal investigations. The earprint appears for example when a criminal tries to listen through a window or a door before entering, and the methods to make it visible are similar to those used in latent fingerprint lifting. However, its acceptance as evidence in real prosecutions still raises doubts. Although it is well-accepted the uniqueness of the ear and its usefulness for person identification, the permanence of such discriminate ability in earprints is not obvious. Although the earprints do not have a powerful distinctiveness information, they are useful in a bag of evidences, being a promising soft biometric. This paper explores the discriminant properties of local descriptors for earprint-based automatic biometric recognition systems. The literature has focused on automatic systems based on the global aspect of the images, however scarcely studies have coped with in the well-known discriminate ability of earprint local characteristics. The experiments using more than 6000 images from 1200 people suggest a promising performance in comparison with previous existing proposals based on global features and encourage to further explore in this new soft biometric traits. Shape cues play an important role in computer vision, but shape is not the only information available in images. Materials, such as fabric and plastic, are discernible in images even when shapes, such as those of an object, are not. We argue that it would be ideal to recognize materials without relying on object cues such as shape. This would allow us to use materials as a context for other vision tasks, such as object recognition. Humans are intuitively able to find visual cues that describe materials. Previous frameworks attempt to recognize these cues (as visual material traits) using fully-supervised learning. This requirement is not feasible when multiple annotators and large quantities of images are involved. In this paper, we derive a framework that allows us to discover locally-recognizable material attributes from crowdsourced perceptual material distances. We show that the attributes we discover do in fact separate material categories. Our learned attributes exhibit the same desirable properties as material traits, despite the fact that they are discovered using only partial supervision. The identification of a person on the basis of scanned images of handwriting is a useful biometric modality with application in forensic and historic document analysis and constitutes an exemplary study area within the research field of behavioral biometrics. We developed new and very effective techniques for automatic writer identification and verification that use probability distribution functions (PDFs) extracted from the handwriting images to characterize writer individuality. A defining property of our methods is that they are designed to be independent of the textual content of the handwritten samples. Our methods operate at two levels of analysis: the texture level and the character-shape (allograph) level. At the texture level, we use contour-based joint directional PDFs that encode orientation and curvature information to give an intimate characterization of individual handwriting style. In our analysis at the allograph level, the writer is considered to be characterized by a stochastic pattern generator of ink-trace fragments, or graphemes. The PDF of these simple shapes in a given handwriting sample is characteristic for the writer and is computed using a common shape codebook obtained by grapheme clustering. Combining multiple features (directional, grapheme, and run-length PDFs) yields increased writer identification and verification performance. The proposed methods are applicable to free-style handwriting (both cursive and isolated) and have practical feasibility, under the assumption that a few text lines of handwritten material are available in order to obtain reliable probability estimates Spoofing attacks are one of the security traits that biometric recognition systems are proven to be vulnerable to. When spoofed, a biometric recognition system is bypassed by presenting a copy of the biometric evidence of a valid user. Among all biometric modalities, spoofing a face recognition system is particularly easy to perform: all that is needed is a simple photograph of the user. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting face spoofing attacks. In particular, we inspect the potential of texture features based on Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and their variations on three types of attacks: printed photographs, and photos and videos displayed on electronic screens of different sizes. For this purpose, we introduce REPLAY-ATTACK, a novel publicly available face spoofing database which contains all the mentioned types of attacks. We conclude that LBP, with ∼15 Half Total Error Rate, show moderate discriminability when confronted with a wide set of attack types. Human age, as an important personal trait, can be directly inferred by distinct patterns emerging from the facial appearance. Derived from rapid advances in computer graphics and machine vision, computer-based age synthesis and estimation via faces have become particularly prevalent topics recently because of their explosively emerging real-world applications, such as forensic art, electronic customer relationship management, security control and surveillance monitoring, biometrics, entertainment, and cosmetology. Age synthesis is defined to rerender a face image aesthetically with natural aging and rejuvenating effects on the individual face. Age estimation is defined to label a face image automatically with the exact age (year) or the age group (year range) of the individual face. Because of their particularity and complexity, both problems are attractive yet challenging to computer-based application system designers. Large efforts from both academia and industry have been devoted in the last a few decades. In this paper, we survey the complete state-of-the-art techniques in the face image-based age synthesis and estimation topics. Existing models, popular algorithms, system performances, technical difficulties, popular face aging databases, evaluation protocols, and promising future directions are also provided with systematic discussions.