Soft Biometrics and Their Application in Person Recognition at a Distance

Abstract

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.

Analysing comparative soft biometrics from crowdsourced annotations

“…This is a compelling premise for our work; to investigate the power of standalone soft biometrics in performing identification, showing they provide more than just subsidiary information. We focus on describing global and body traits due to their permanence, view-point invariance, visibility at-a-distance [39] and enhanced measurement discriminability [23] over the face. Furthermore, Kuehn discovers global and body features were mentioned over 70% of the time in eyewitness testimony [19] and MacLeod et al identifies the 13 most reliable whole body descriptors [24].…”

“…They have been shown to be objective, salient, reliable and robust to changes in distance [39,36]. The power of soft biometrics lies in their ability to bridge the semantic gap between high-level human description and low-level biometric features generated from images [36].…”

“…We describe 100 subject images captured in a synthetic environment [38], similar to [37,36,39,6]. This enables a coherent appraisal of the value in crowdsourcing such novel annotations and a comparison of recognition performance to [37,36] who use similar image sets.…”

Facial soft biometric features for forensic face recognition

“…They showed that soft biometrics can complement the traditional (primary) biometric identifiers (like face recognition) [23], and can also be useful as a source of evidence in courts of law because they are more descriptive than the numerical matching scores generated by a traditional face matcher. But in most cases, this ancillary information by itself is not sufficient to recognize a user.…”

Biometric Authentication

“…Facial marks, for instance, can be automatically detected and ascribed to be used as micro soft traits to supplement primary facial features for improved face recognition and fast retrieval, besides they may enable matching with low resolution or partial images [6,7]. For surveillance purposes, different forms of soft biometrics take place in various means of applications and scenarios [1,8,9].…”