Abstract-Soft biometric information extracted from a human body (e.g., height, gender, skin color, hair color, and so on) is ancillary information easily distinguished at a distance but it is not fully distinctive by itself in recognition tasks. However, this soft information can be explicitly fused with biometric recognition systems to improve the overall recognition when confronting high variability conditions. One significant example is visual surveillance, where face images are usually captured in poor quality conditions with high variability and automatic face recognition systems do not work properly. In this scenario, the soft biometric information can provide very valuable information for person recognition. This paper presents an experimental study of the benefits of soft biometric labels as ancillary information based on the description of human physical features to improve challenging person recognition scenarios at a distance. In addition, we analyze the available soft biometric information in scenarios of varying distance between camera and subject. Experimental results based on the Southampton multibiometric tunnel database show that the use of soft biometric traits is able to improve the performance of face recognition based on sparse representation on real and ideal scenarios by adaptive fusion rules.

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El acceso a la versión del editor puede requerir la suscripción del recurso Access to the published version may require subscription AbstractThis paper proposes a functional feature-based approach useful for real forensic caseworks, based on the shape, orientation and size of facial traits, which can be considered as a soft biometric approach. The motivation of this work is to provide a set of facial features, which can be understood by non-experts such as judges and support the work of forensic examiners who, in practice, carry out a thorough manual comparison of face images paying special attention to the similarities and differences in shape and size of various facial traits. This new approach constitutes a tool that automatically converts a set of facial landmarks to a set of features (shape and size) corresponding to facial regions of forensic value. These features are furthermore evaluated in a population to generate statistics to support forensic examiners. The proposed features can also be used as additional information that can improve the performance of traditional face recognition systems. These features follow the forensic methodology and are obtained in a continuous and discrete manner from raw images. A statistical analysis is also carried out to study the stability, discrimination power and correlation of the proposed facial features on two realistic databases: MORPH and ATVS Forensic DB. Finally, the performance of both continuous and discrete features is analysed using different similarity measures. Experimental results show high discrimination power and good recognition performance, especially for continuous features. A final fusion of the best systems configurations achieves rank 10 match results of 100% for ATVS database and 75% for MORPH database demonstrating the benefits of using this information in practice.

El acceso a la versión del editor puede requerir la suscripción del recurso Access to the published version may require subscription AbstractThis paper reports an exhaustive analysis of the discriminative power of the different regions of the human face on various forensic scenarios. In practice, when forensic examiners compare two face images, they focus their attention not only on the overall similarity of the two faces. They carry out an exhaustive morphological comparison region by region (e.g., nose, mouth, eyebrows, etc.). In this scenario it is very important to know based on scientific methods to what extent each facial region can help in identifying a person. This knowledge obtained using quantitative and statical methods on given populations can then be used by the examiner to support or tune his observations. In order to generate such scientific knowledge useful for the expert, several methodologies are compared, such as manual and automatic facial landmarks extraction, different facial regions extractors, and various distances between the subject and the acquisition camera. Also, three scenarios of interest for forensics are considered comparing mugshot and Closed-Circuit TeleVision (CCTV) face images using MORPH and SCface databases. One of the findings is that depending of the acquisition distances, the discriminative power of the facial regions change, having in some cases better performance than the full face.

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Abstract:A palm vein database acquired by a contactless sensor together with an experimental framework freely available for fair reproducible research purposes are described. The palm vein recognition system uses automatic palm region segmentation and circular Gabor filter approach to enhance the veins in the preprocessing, LBP features and histogram intersection as matching. Results are presented comparing two automatic segmentation using the ROI-1 region proportioned by the acquisition sensor and the ROI-2 region generated by the recognition software developed. Complete benchmark results using popular methods and the source code are attached to the database as a reference for other researchers.

Abstract-Finger vein recognition is a recent biometric application, which relies on the use of human finger vein patterns beneath the skin's surface. While several methods have been proposed in the literature, its applicability to uncontrolled scenarios has not yet been shown. To this purpose this paper first introduces the VERA database, a new challenging publicly available database of finger vein images. This corpus consists of 440 index finger images from 110 subjects collected with an open device in an uncontrolled way. Second, an evaluation of state-ofthe-art finger vein recognition systems is performed, both on the controlled UTFVP database and on the new VERA database. This is achieved using a new open source and extensible finger vein recognition framework, which allows fair and reproducible benchmarks. Experimental results show that challenging recording conditions such as misalignments of the fingers lead to an absolute degradation in equal error rate of 2.75% up to 24.10% on VERA when compared to the best performances on UTFVP.