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Josef Bigun

Publications and source records attributed to Josef Bigun.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

One-Shot Learning for Periocular Recognition: Exploring the Effect of Domain Adaptation and Data Bias on Deep Representations

One weakness of machine-learning algorithms is the need to train the models for a new task. This presents a specific challenge for biometric recognition due to the dynamic nature of databases and, in some instances, the reliance on subject collaboration for data collection. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of deep representations in widely used CNN models under extreme data scarcity for One-Shot periocular recognition, a biometric recognition task. We analyze the outputs of CNN layers as identity-representing feature vectors. We examine the impact of Domain Adaptation on the network layers' output for unseen data and evaluate the method's robustness concerning data normalization and generalization of the best-performing layer. We improved state-of-the-art results that made use of networks trained with biometric datasets with millions of images and fine-tuned for the target periocular dataset by utilizing out-of-the-box CNNs trained for the ImageNet Recognition Challenge and standard computer vision algorithms. For example, for the Cross-Eyed dataset, we could reduce the EER by 67% and 79% (from 1.70% and 3.41% to 0.56% and 0.71%) in the Close-World and Open-World protocols, respectively, for the periocular case. We also demonstrate that traditional algorithms like SIFT can outperform CNNs in situations with limited data or scenarios where the network has not been trained with the test classes like the Open-World mode. SIFT alone was able to reduce the EER by 64% and 71.6% (from 1.7% and 3.41% to 0.6% and 0.97%) for Cross-Eyed in the Close-World and Open-World protocols, respectively, and a reduction of 4.6% (from 3.94% to 3.76%) in the PolyU database for the Open-World and single biometric case.

cs.CV↗

Visual Detection of Personal Protective Equipment and Safety Gear on Industry Workers

Workplace injuries are common in today's society due to a lack of adequately worn safety equipment. A system that only admits appropriately equipped personnel can be created to improve working conditions. The goal is thus to develop a system that will improve workers' safety using a camera that will detect the usage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). To this end, we collected and labeled appropriate data from several public sources, which have been used to train and evaluate several models based on the popular YOLOv4 object detector. Our focus, driven by a collaborating industrial partner, is to implement our system into an entry control point where workers must present themselves to obtain access to a restricted area. Combined with facial identity recognition, the system would ensure that only authorized people wearing appropriate equipment are granted access. A novelty of this work is that we increase the number of classes to five objects (hardhat, safety vest, safety gloves, safety glasses, and hearing protection), whereas most existing works only focus on one or two classes, usually hardhats or vests. The AI model developed provides good detection accuracy at a distance of 3 and 5 meters in the collaborative environment where we aim at operating (mAP of 99/89%, respectively). The small size of some objects or the potential occlusion by body parts have been identified as potential factors that are detrimental to accuracy, which we have counteracted via data augmentation and cropping of the body before applying PPE detection.

cs.CV↗

Combining multiple matchers for fingerprint verification: A case study in biosecure network of excellence

We report on experiments for the fingerprint modality conducted during the First BioSecure Residential Workshop. Two reference systems for fingerprint verification have been tested together with two additional non-reference systems. These systems follow different approaches of fingerprint processing and are discussed in detail. Fusion experiments I volving different combinations of the available systems are presented. The experimental results show that the best recognition strategy involves both minutiae-based and correlation-based measurements. Regarding the fusion experiments, the best relative improvement is obtained when fusing systems that are based on heterogeneous strategies for feature extraction and/or matching. The best combinations of two/three/four systems always include the best individual systems whereas the best verification performance is obtained when combining all the available systems.

cs.CV↗

Fingerprint Image-Quality Estimation and its Application to Multialgorithm Verification

Signal-quality awareness has been found to increase recognition rates and to support decisions in multisensor environments significantly. Nevertheless, automatic quality assessment is still an open issue. Here, we study the orientation tensor of fingerprint images to quantify signal impairments, such as noise, lack of structure, blur, with the help of symmetry descriptors. A strongly reduced reference is especially favorable in biometrics, but less information is not sufficient for the approach. This is also supported by numerous experiments involving a simpler quality estimator, a trained method (NFIQ), as well as the human perception of fingerprint quality on several public databases. Furthermore, quality measurements are extensively reused to adapt fusion parameters in a monomodal multialgorithm fingerprint recognition environment. In this study, several trained and nontrained score-level fusion schemes are investigated. A Bayes-based strategy for incorporating experts past performances and current quality conditions, a novel cascaded scheme for computational efficiency, besides simple fusion rules, is presented. The quantitative results favor quality awareness under all aspects, boosting recognition rates and fusing differently skilled experts efficiently as well as effectively (by training).

cs.CV↗

Near-infrared and visible-light periocular recognition with Gabor features using frequency-adaptive automatic eye detection

Periocular recognition has gained attention recently due to demands of increased robustness of face or iris in less controlled scenarios. We present a new system for eye detection based on complex symmetry filters, which has the advantage of not needing training. Also, separability of the filters allows faster detection via one-dimensional convolutions. This system is used as input to a periocular algorithm based on retinotopic sampling grids and Gabor spectrum decomposition. The evaluation framework is composed of six databases acquired both with near-infrared and visible sensors. The experimental setup is complemented with four iris matchers, used for fusion experiments. The eye detection system presented shows very high accuracy with near-infrared data, and a reasonable good accuracy with one visible database. Regarding the periocular system, it exhibits great robustness to small errors in locating the eye centre, as well as to scale changes of the input image. The density of the sampling grid can also be reduced without sacrificing accuracy. Lastly, despite the poorer performance of the iris matchers with visible data, fusion with the periocular system can provide an improvement of more than 20%. The six databases used have been manually annotated, with the annotation made publicly available.

cs.CV↗

Experimental analysis regarding the influence of iris segmentation on the recognition rate

In this study the authors will look at the detection and segmentation of the iris and its influence on the overall performance of the iris-biometric tool chain. The authors will examine whether the segmentation accuracy, based on conformance with a ground truth, can serve as a predictor for the overall performance of the iris-biometric tool chain. That is: If the segmentation accuracy is improved will this always improve the overall performance? Furthermore, the authors will systematically evaluate the influence of segmentation parameters, pupillary and limbic boundary and normalisation centre (based on Daugman's rubbersheet model), on the rest of the iris-biometric tool chain. The authors will investigate if accurately finding these parameters is important and how consistency, that is, extracting the same exact region of the iris during segmenting, influences the overall performance.

cs.CV↗

Real-time AdaBoost cascade face tracker based on likelihood map and optical flow

The authors present a novel face tracking approach where optical flow information is incorporated into a modified version of the Viola Jones detection algorithm. In the original algorithm, detection is static, as information from previous frames is not considered. In addition, candidate windows have to pass all stages of the classification cascade, otherwise they are discarded as containing no face. In contrast, the proposed tracker preserves information about the number of classification stages passed by each window. Such information is used to build a likelihood map, which represents the probability of having a face located at that position. Tracking capabilities are provided by extrapolating the position of the likelihood map to the next frame by optical flow computation. The proposed algorithm works in real time on a standard laptop. The system is verified on the Boston Head Tracking Database, showing that the proposed algorithm outperforms the standard Viola Jones detector in terms of detection rate and stability of the output bounding box, as well as including the capability to deal with occlusions. The authors also evaluate two recently published face detectors based on convolutional networks and deformable part models with their algorithm showing a comparable accuracy at a fraction of the computation time.

cs.CV↗

Very Low-Resolution Iris Recognition Via Eigen-Patch Super-Resolution and Matcher Fusion

Current research in iris recognition is moving towards enabling more relaxed acquisition conditions. This has effects on the quality of acquired images, with low resolution being a predominant issue. Here, we evaluate a super-resolution algorithm used to reconstruct iris images based on Eigen-transformation of local image patches. Each patch is reconstructed separately, allowing better quality of enhanced images by preserving local information. Contrast enhancement is used to improve the reconstruction quality, while matcher fusion has been adopted to improve iris recognition performance. We validate the system using a database of 1,872 near-infrared iris images. The presented approach is superior to bilinear or bicubic interpolation, especially at lower resolutions, and the fusion of the two systems pushes the EER to below 5% for down-sampling factors up to a image size of only 13x13.

cs.CV↗

Compact multi-scale periocular recognition using SAFE features

In this paper, we present a new approach for periocular recognition based on the Symmetry Assessment by Feature Expansion (SAFE) descriptor, which encodes the presence of various symmetric curve families around image key points. We use the sclera center as single key point for feature extraction, highlighting the object-like identity properties that concentrates to this unique point of the eye. As it is demonstrated, such discriminative properties can be encoded with a reduced set of symmetric curves. Experiments are done with a database of periocular images captured with a digital camera. We test our system against reference periocular features, achieving top performance with a considerably smaller feature vector (given by the use of a single key point). All the systems tested also show a nearly steady correlation between acquisition distance and performance, and they are also able to cope well when enrolment and test images are not captured at the same distance. Fusion experiments among the available systems are also provided.

cs.CV↗

On the Effect of Selfie Beautification Filters on Face Detection and Recognition

Beautification and augmented reality filters are very popular in applications that use selfie images captured with smartphones or personal devices. However, they can distort or modify biometric features, severely affecting the capability of recognizing individuals' identity or even detecting the face. Accordingly, we address the effect of such filters on the accuracy of automated face detection and recognition. The social media image filters studied either modify the image contrast or illumination or occlude parts of the face with for example artificial glasses or animal noses. We observe that the effect of some of these filters is harmful both to face detection and identity recognition, specially if they obfuscate the eye or (to a lesser extent) the nose. To counteract such effect, we develop a method to reconstruct the applied manipulation with a modified version of the U-NET segmentation network. This is observed to contribute to a better face detection and recognition accuracy. From a recognition perspective, we employ distance measures and trained machine learning algorithms applied to features extracted using a ResNet-34 network trained to recognize faces. We also evaluate if incorporating filtered images to the training set of machine learning approaches are beneficial for identity recognition. Our results show good recognition when filters do not occlude important landmarks, specially the eyes (identification accuracy >99%, EER<2%). The combined effect of the proposed approaches also allow to mitigate the effect produced by filters that occlude parts of the face, achieving an identification accuracy of >92% with the majority of perturbations evaluated, and an EER <8%. Although there is room for improvement, when neither U-NET reconstruction nor training with filtered images is applied, the accuracy with filters that severely occlude the eye is <72% (identification) and >12% (EER)

cs.CV↗

Super-Resolution for Selfie Biometrics: Introduction and Application to Face and Iris

The lack of resolution has a negative impact on the performance of image-based biometrics. Many applications which are becoming ubiquitous in mobile devices do not operate in a controlled environment, and their performance significantly drops due to the lack of pixel resolution. While many generic super-resolution techniques have been studied to restore low-resolution images for biometrics, the results obtained are not always as desired. Those generic methods are usually aimed to enhance the visual appearance of the scene. However, producing an overall visual enhancement of biometric images does not necessarily correlate with a better recognition performance. Such techniques are designed to restore generic images and therefore do not exploit the specific structure found in biometric images (e.g. iris or faces), which causes the solution to be sub-optimal. For this reason, super-resolution techniques have to be adapted for the particularities of images from a specific biometric modality. In recent years, there has been an increased interest in the application of super-resolution to different biometric modalities, such as face iris, gait or fingerprint. This chapter presents an overview of recent advances in super-resolution reconstruction of face and iris images, which are the two prevalent modalities in selfie biometrics. We also provide experimental results using several state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms, demonstrating the benefits of using super-resolution to improve the quality of face and iris images prior to classification. In the reported experiments, we study the application of super-resolution to face and iris images captured in the visible range, using experimental setups that represent well the selfie biometrics scenario.

cs.CV↗

Cross-Sensor Periocular Biometrics in a Global Pandemic: Comparative Benchmark and Novel Multialgorithmic Approach

The massive availability of cameras results in a wide variability of imaging conditions, producing large intra-class variations and a significant performance drop if heterogeneous images are compared for person recognition. However, as biometrics is deployed, it is common to replace damaged or obsolete hardware, or to exchange information between heterogeneous applications. Variations in spectral bands can also occur. For example, surveillance face images (typically acquired in the visible spectrum, VIS) may need to be compared against a legacy iris database (typically acquired in near-infrared, NIR). Here, we propose a multialgorithmic approach to cope with periocular images from different sensors. With face masks in the front line against COVID-19, periocular recognition is regaining popularity since it is the only face region that remains visible. We integrate different comparators with a fusion scheme based on linear logistic regression, in which scores are represented by log-likelihood ratios. This allows easy interpretation of scores and the use of Bayes thresholds for optimal decision-making since scores from different comparators are in the same probabilistic range. We evaluate our approach in the context of the Cross-Eyed Competition, whose aim was to compare recognition approaches when NIR and VIS periocular images are matched. Our approach achieves EER=0.2% and FRR of just 0.47% at FAR=0.01%, representing the best overall approach of the competition. Experiments are also reported with a database of VIS images from different smartphones. We also discuss the impact of template size and computation times, with the most computationally heavy comparator playing an important role in the results. Lastly, the proposed method is shown to outperform other popular fusion approaches, such as the average of scores, SVMs or Random Forest.

cs.CV↗

LFW-Beautified: A Dataset of Face Images with Beautification and Augmented Reality Filters

Selfie images enjoy huge popularity in social media. The same platforms centered around sharing this type of images offer filters to beautify them or incorporate augmented reality effects. Studies suggests that filtered images attract more views and engagement. Selfie images are also in increasing use in security applications due to mobiles becoming data hubs for many transactions. Also, video conference applications, boomed during the pandemic, include such filters. Such filters may destroy biometric features that would allow person recognition or even detection of the face itself, even if such commodity applications are not necessarily used to compromise facial systems. This could also affect subsequent investigations like crimes in social media, where automatic analysis is usually necessary given the amount of information posted in social sites or stored in devices or cloud repositories. To help in counteracting such issues, we contribute with a database of facial images that includes several manipulations. It includes image enhancement filters (which mostly modify contrast and lightning) and augmented reality filters that incorporate items like animal noses or glasses. Additionally, images with sunglasses are processed with a reconstruction network trained to learn to reverse such modifications. This is because obfuscating the eye region has been observed in the literature to have the highest impact on the accuracy of face detection or recognition. We start from the popular Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) database, to which we apply different modifications, generating 8 datasets. Each dataset contains 4,324 images of size 64 x 64, with a total of 34,592 images. The use of a public and widely employed face dataset allows for replication and comparison. The created database is available at https://github.com/HalmstadUniversityBiometrics/LFW-Beautified

cs.CV↗

Writer Recognition Using Off-line Handwritten Single Block Characters

Block characters are often used when filling paper forms for a variety of purposes. We investigate if there is biometric information contained within individual digits of handwritten text. In particular, we use personal identity numbers consisting of the six digits of the date of birth, DoB. We evaluate two recognition approaches, one based on handcrafted features that compute contour directional measurements, and another based on deep features from a ResNet50 model. We use a self-captured database of 317 individuals and 4920 written DoBs in total. Results show the presence of identity-related information in a piece of handwritten information as small as six digits with the DoB. We also analyze the impact of the amount of enrolment samples, varying its number between one and ten. Results with such small amount of data are promising. With ten enrolment samples, the Top-1 accuracy with deep features is around 94%, and reaches nearly 100% by Top-10. The verification accuracy is more modest, with EER>20%with any given feature and enrolment set size, showing that there is still room for improvement.

cs.CV↗

Continuous Examination by Automatic Quiz Assessment Using Spiral Codes and Image Processing

We describe a technical solution implemented at Halmstad University to automatise assessment and reporting of results of paper-based quiz exams. Paper quizzes are affordable and within reach of campus education in classrooms. Offering and taking them is accepted as they cause fewer issues with reliability and democratic access, e.g. a large number of students can take them without a trusted mobile device, internet, or battery. By contrast, correction of the quiz is a considerable obstacle. We suggest mitigating the issue by a novel image processing technique using harmonic spirals that aligns answer sheets in sub-pixel accuracy to read student identity and answers and to email results within minutes, all fully automatically. Using the described method, we carry out regular weekly examinations in two master courses at the mentioned centre without a significant workload increase. The employed solution also enables us to assign a unique identifier to each quiz (e.g. week 1, week 2. . . ) while allowing us to have an individualised quiz for each student.

cs.CV↗

A Comparative Study of Fingerprint Image-Quality Estimation Methods

One of the open issues in fingerprint verification is the lack of robustness against image-quality degradation. Poor-quality images result in spurious and missing features, thus degrading the performance of the overall system. Therefore, it is important for a fingerprint recognition system to estimate the quality and validity of the captured fingerprint images. In this work, we review existing approaches for fingerprint image-quality estimation, including the rationale behind the published measures and visual examples showing their behavior under different quality conditions. We have also tested a selection of fingerprint image-quality estimation algorithms. For the experiments, we employ the BioSec multimodal baseline corpus, which includes 19200 fingerprint images from 200 individuals acquired in two sessions with three different sensors. The behavior of the selected quality measures is compared, showing high correlation between them in most cases. The effect of low-quality samples in the verification performance is also studied for a widely available minutiae-based fingerprint matching system.

cs.CV↗

Facial Masks and Soft-Biometrics: Leveraging Face Recognition CNNs for Age and Gender Prediction on Mobile Ocular Images

We address the use of selfie ocular images captured with smartphones to estimate age and gender. Partial face occlusion has become an issue due to the mandatory use of face masks. Also, the use of mobile devices has exploded, with the pandemic further accelerating the migration to digital services. However, state-of-the-art solutions in related tasks such as identity or expression recognition employ large Convolutional Neural Networks, whose use in mobile devices is infeasible due to hardware limitations and size restrictions of downloadable applications. To counteract this, we adapt two existing lightweight CNNs proposed in the context of the ImageNet Challenge, and two additional architectures proposed for mobile face recognition. Since datasets for soft-biometrics prediction using selfie images are limited, we counteract over-fitting by using networks pre-trained on ImageNet. Furthermore, some networks are further pre-trained for face recognition, for which very large training databases are available. Since both tasks employ similar input data, we hypothesize that such strategy can be beneficial for soft-biometrics estimation. A comprehensive study of the effects of different pre-training over the employed architectures is carried out, showing that, in most cases, a better accuracy is obtained after the networks have been fine-tuned for face recognition.

cs.CV↗

Writer Identification Using Microblogging Texts for Social Media Forensics

Establishing authorship of online texts is fundamental to combat cybercrimes. Unfortunately, text length is limited on some platforms, making the challenge harder. We aim at identifying the authorship of Twitter messages limited to 140 characters. We evaluate popular stylometric features, widely used in literary analysis, and specific Twitter features like URLs, hashtags, replies or quotes. We use two databases with 93 and 3957 authors, respectively. We test varying sized author sets and varying amounts of training/test texts per author. Performance is further improved by feature combination via automatic selection. With a large number of training Tweets (>500), a good accuracy (Rank-5>80%) is achievable with only a few dozens of test Tweets, even with several thousands of authors. With smaller sample sizes (10-20 training Tweets), the search space can be diminished by 9-15% while keeping a high chance that the correct author is retrieved among the candidates. In such cases, automatic attribution can provide significant time savings to experts in suspect search. For completeness, we report verification results. With few training/test Tweets, the EER is above 20-25%, which is reduced to < 15% if hundreds of training Tweets are available. We also quantify the computational complexity and time permanence of the employed features.

cs.CL↗