In this paper, we propose a new spatio-temporal gait representation, called Gait Energy Image (GEI), to characterize human walking properties for individual recognition by gait. To address the problem of the lack of training templates, we also propose a novel approach for human recognition by combining statistical gait features from real and synthetic templates. We directly compute the real templates from training silhouette sequences, while we generate the synthetic templates from training sequences by simulating silhouette distortion. We use a statistical approach for learning effective features from real and synthetic templates. We compare the proposed GEI-based gait recognition approach with other gait recognition approaches on USF HumanID Database. Experimental results show that the proposed GEI is an effective and efficient gait representation for individual recognition, and the proposed approach achieves highly competitive performance with respect to the published gait recognition approaches.

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This paper is concerned with accurate and efficient indexing of fingerprint images. We present a model-based approach, which efficiently retrieves correct hypotheses using novel features of triangles formed by the triplets of minutiae as the basic representation unit. The triangle features that we use are its angles, handedness, type, direction, and maximum side. Geometric constraints based on other characteristics of minutiae are used to eliminate false correspondences. Experimental results on live-scan fingerprint images of varying quality and NIST special database 4 (NIST-4) show that our indexing approach efficiently narrows down the number of candidate hypotheses in the presence of translation, rotation, scale, shear, occlusion, and clutter. We also perform scientific experiments to compare the performance of our approach with another prominent indexing approach and show that the performance of our approach is better for both the live scan database and the ink based database NIST-4.

Human ear is a new class of relatively stable biometrics that has drawn researchers' attention recently. In this paper, we propose a complete human recognition system using 3D ear biometrics. The system consists of 3D ear detection, 3D ear identification, and 3D ear verification. For ear detection, we propose a new approach which uses a single reference 3D ear shape model and locates the ear helix and the antihelix parts in registered 2D color and 3D range images. For ear identification and verification using range images, two new representations are proposed. These include the ear helix/antihelix representation obtained from the detection algorithm and the local surface patch (LSP) representation computed at feature points. A local surface descriptor is characterized by a centroid, a local surface type, and a 2D histogram. The 2D histogram shows the frequency of occurrence of shape index values versus the angles between the normal of reference feature point and that of its neighbors. Both shape representations are used to estimate the initial rigid transformation between a gallery-probe pair. This transformation is applied to selected locations of ears in the gallery set and a modified Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm is used to iteratively refine the transformation to bring the gallery ear and probe ear into the best alignment in the sense of the least root mean square error. The experimental results on the UCR data set of 155 subjects with 902 images under pose variations and the University of Notre Dame data set of 302 subjects with time-lapse gallery-probe pairs are presented to compare and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms and the system.

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Abstract-Current moving object detection systems typically detect shadows cast by the moving object as part of the moving object. In this paper, the problem of separating moving cast shadows from the moving objects in an outdoor environment is addressed. Unlike previous work, we present an approach that does not rely on any geometrical assumptions such as camera location and ground surface/object geometry. The approach is based on a new spatio-temporal albedo test and dichromatic reflection model and accounts for both the sun and the sky illuminations. Results are presented for several video sequences representing a variety of ground materials when the shadows are cast on different surface types. These results show that our approach is robust to widely different background and foreground materials, and illuminations.

Practical applications of graphene require a reliable high-throughput method of graphene identification and quality control, which can be used for large-scale substrates and wafers. We have proposed and experimentally tested a fast and fully automated approach for determining the number of atomic planes in graphene samples. The procedure allows for in situ identification of the borders of the regions with the same number of atomic planes. It is based on an original image processing algorithm, which utilizes micro-Raman calibration, light background subtraction, lighting nonuniformity correction, and the color and grayscale image processing for each pixel. The outcome of the developed procedure is a pseudo color map, which marks the single-layer and few-layer graphene regions on the substrate of any size that can be captured by an optical microscope. Our approach works for various substrates and can be applied to mechanically exfoliated, chemically derived, deposited or epitaxial graphene on an industrial scale.