The massive availability of cameras and personal devices results in a wide variability between imaging conditions, producing large intra-class variations and performance drop if such images are compared for person recognition. However, as biometric solutions are extensively deployed, it will be common to replace acquisition hardware as it is damaged or newer designs appear, or to exchange information between agencies or applications in heterogeneous environments. Furthermore, variations in imaging bands can also occur. For example, faces are typically acquired in the visible (VW) spectrum, while iris images are captured in the near-infrared (NIR) spectrum. However, cross-spectrum comparison may be needed if for example a face from a surveillance camera needs to be compared against a legacy iris database. Here, we propose a multialgorithmic approach to cope with cross-sensor periocular recognition. We integrate different systems using a fusion scheme based on linear logistic regression, in which fused scores tend to be log-likelihood ratios. This allows easy combination by just summing scores of available systems. We evaluate our approach in the context of the 1st Cross-Spectral Iris Periocular Competition, whose aim was to compare person recognition approaches when periocular data from VW and NIR images is matched. The proposed fusion approach achieves reductions in error rates of up to 20-30 in cross-spectral NIR-VW comparison, leading to an EER of 0.22 and a FRR of just 0.62 for FAR=0.01 , representing the best overall approach of the mentioned competition.. Experiments are also reported with a database of VW images from two different smartphones, achieving even higher relative improvements in performance. We also discuss our approach from the point of view of template size and computation times, with the most computationally heavy system playing an important role in the results.
Presents a theoretically very simple, yet efficient, multiresolution approach to gray-scale and rotation invariant texture classification based on local binary patterns and nonparametric discrimination of sample and prototype distributions. The method is based on recognizing that certain local binary patterns, termed "uniform," are fundamental properties of local image texture and their occurrence histogram is proven to be a very powerful texture feature. We derive a generalized gray-scale and rotation invariant operator presentation that allows for detecting the "uniform" patterns for any quantization of the angular space and for any spatial resolution and presents a method for combining multiple operators for multiresolution analysis. The proposed approach is very robust in terms of gray-scale variations since the operator is, by definition, invariant against any monotonic transformation of the gray scale. Another advantage is computational simplicity as the operator can be realized with a few operations in a small neighborhood and a lookup table. Experimental results demonstrate that good discrimination can be achieved with the occurrence statistics of simple rotation invariant local binary patterns. We study the question of feature sets for robust visual object recognition; adopting linear SVM based human detection as a test case. After reviewing existing edge and gradient based descriptors, we show experimentally that grids of histograms of oriented gradient (HOG) descriptors significantly outperform existing feature sets for human detection. We study the influence of each stage of the computation on performance, concluding that fine-scale gradients, fine orientation binning, relatively coarse spatial binning, and high-quality local contrast normalization in overlapping descriptor blocks are all important for good results. The new approach gives near-perfect separation on the original MIT pedestrian database, so we introduce a more challenging dataset containing over 1800 annotated human images with a large range of pose variations and backgrounds. Recent development of sensors has allowed to explore the possibility of biometric authentication beyond visible spectrum.Particularly, multi-spectral imaging has shown a great potential in biometrics to work robustly under unknown varying illumination conditions for face recognition. While face biometrics in traditional settings has also indicated the applicability of ocular regions for improving the recognition performance, there are not many works that have explored recent imaging techniques. In this paper, we present a study that explores the possibility of recognizing ocular biometric features using multi-spectral imaging. While exploring the possibility of recognizing the periocular region in different spectral bands, this work also presents the performance variation of periocular region for cross-spectral recognition. We have captured a new ocular image database in eight narrow spectral bands across Visible (VIS) and Near-Infra-Red (NIR) spectrum (530nm to 1000nm) using our custom built sensor. The database consists of images from 52 subjects with a sample size of 4160 spectral band images captured in two different sessions. The extensive set of experimental evaluation obtained on the state-of-the-art methods indicate highest recognition rate of 96.92 at Rank-1, demonstrating the potential of multi-spectral imaging for robust periocular recognition. A new compound operator is proposed for heterogeneous periocular recognition.The new operator outperforms three basic operators and three state-of-the-art compound operators.NIR, SWIR, MWIR and LWIR spectra at different standoff distances are considered.A metric is introduced to measure image quality and explain its impact on performance.The new operator does not require training and can be applied to various datasets. Cross-spectral matching of active and passive infrared (IR) periocular images to a visible light periocular image gallery is a challenging research problem. This scenario is motivated by a number of surveillance applications such as recognition of subjects at night or in harsh environmental conditions. This problem becomes even more challenging with a varying standoff distance. To address this problem a new compound operator named GWLH that fuses three local descriptors - Histogram of Gradients (HOG), Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and Weber Local Descriptors (WLD) - applied to the outputs of Gabor filters is proposed. The local operators encode both magnitude and phase information. When applied to periocular regions, GWLH outperforms other compound operators that recently appeared in the literature. During performance evaluation LBP, Gabor filters, HOG, and a fusion of HOG and LBP establish a baseline for the performance comparison, while other compound operators such as Gabor followed by HOG and LBP as well as Gabor followed by WLD, LBP and GLBP present the state-of-the-art. The active IR band is presented by short-wave infrared (SWIR) and near-infrared (NIR) and passive IR is presented by mid-wave infrared (MWIR) and long-wave infrared (LWIR). In addition to varying spectrum, we also vary the standoff distance of SWIR and NIR probes. In all but one case of the combination of spectrum and range, GWLH outperforms all the other operators. A sharpness metric is introduced to measure the quality of heterogeneous periocular images and to emphasize the need in development of image enhancement approaches for heterogeneous periocular biometrics. Based on the statistics of the sharpness metric, the performance difference between compound and single operators is increasing proportionally with increasing sharpness metric values. Inspired by Weber's Law, this paper proposes a simple, yet very powerful and robust local descriptor, called the Weber Local Descriptor (WLD). It is based on the fact that human perception of a pattern depends not only on the change of a stimulus (such as sound, lighting) but also on the original intensity of the stimulus. Specifically, WLD consists of two components: differential excitation and orientation. The differential excitation component is a function of the ratio between two terms: One is the relative intensity differences of a current pixel against its neighbors, the other is the intensity of the current pixel. The orientation component is the gradient orientation of the current pixel. For a given image, we use the two components to construct a concatenated WLD histogram. Experimental results on the Brodatz and KTH-TIPS2-a texture databases show that WLD impressively outperforms the other widely used descriptors (e.g., Gabor and SIFT). In addition, experimental results on human face detection also show a promising performance comparable to the best known results on the MIT+CMU frontal face test set, the AR face data set, and the CMU profile test set.