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, etc. 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 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 image and 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.

The matching performance of automated face recognition has significantly improved over the past decade. At the same time several challenges remain that significantly affect the deployment of such systems in security applications. In this work, we study the impact of a commonly used face altering technique that has received limited attention in the biometric literature, viz., non-permanent facial makeup. Towards understanding its impact, we first assemble two databases containing face images of subjects, before and after applying makeup. We present experimental results on both databases that reveal the effect of makeup on automated face recognition and suggest that this simple alteration can indeed compromise the accuracy of a biometric system. While these are early results, our findings clearly indicate the need for a better understanding of this face altering scheme and the importance of designing algorithms that can successfully overcome the obstacle imposed by the application of facial makeup.

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Facial makeup has the ability to alter the appearance of a person. Such