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arXiv · 2610.29495

Balancing Foundation Models and Trait-Specific Learning for Forehead-Crease Recognition

Geetanjali Sharma·Aryan Jain·Dev Nagaich·Aditya Nigam·Raghavendra Ramachandra
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Abstract

Biometric recognition often degrades under partial facial vis- ibility, where conventional facial cues are occluded. The forehead region remains consistently visible and contains distinctive crease patterns that can serve as a complementary biometric trait. We present a unified eval- uation of forehead-crease recognition across explainable zero-shot rea- soning, domain-adaptive learning, and trait-specific modeling. FIRE en- ables interpretable zero-shot verification using multimodal large language models, while pretrained face-recognition models are adapted to the fore- head domain through margin-based learning. Under open-set evaluation, the best zero-shot model GPT-4o+FIRE achieves 18.22% EER, while Edge-Forehead achieves 8.30% EER and 54.01% TMR@0.1% FMR. The results show that although MLLMs offer interpretable zero-shot verifi- cation, trait-specific learning remains more effective for robust forehead- crease biometric recognition.

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Geetanjali Sharma, Aryan Jain, Dev Nagaich, Aditya Nigam, Raghavendra Ramachandra. 2026-10-21. Balancing Foundation Models and Trait-Specific Learning for Forehead-Crease Recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29495

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