Clustering is the unsupervised classification of patterns (observations, data items, or feature vectors) into groups (clusters). The clustering problem has been addressed in many contexts and by researchers in many disciplines; this reflects its broad appeal and usefulness as one of the steps in exploratory data analysis. However, clustering is a difficult problem combinatorially, and differences in assumptions and contexts in different communities has made the transfer of useful generic concepts and methodologies slow to occur. This paper presents an overview of pattern clustering methods from a statistical pattern recognition perspective, with a goal of providing useful advice and references to fundamental concepts accessible to the broad community of clustering practitioners. We present a taxonomy of clustering techniques, and identify cross-cutting themes and recent advances. We also describe some important applications of clustering algorithms such as image segmentation, object recognition, and information retrieval.

/pdf/data-clustering-a-review-4c452f5cab.pdf

Data clustering: a review

A major new professional reference work on fingerprint security systems and technology from leading international researchers in the field Handbook provides authoritative and comprehensive coverage of all major topics, concepts, and methods for fingerprint security systems This unique reference work is an absolutely essential resource for all biometric security professionals, researchers, and systems administrators

/pdf/handbook-of-fingerprint-recognition-16mh887j24.pdf

Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition

In order to ensure that the performance of an automatic fingerprint identification/verification system will be robust with respect to the quality of input fingerprint images, it is essential to incorporate a fingerprint enhancement algorithm in the minutiae extraction module. We present a fast fingerprint enhancement algorithm, which can adaptively improve the clarity of ridge and valley structures of input fingerprint images based on the estimated local ridge orientation and frequency. We have evaluated the performance of the image enhancement algorithm using the goodness index of the extracted minutiae and the accuracy of an online fingerprint verification system. Experimental results show that incorporating the enhancement algorithm improves both the goodness index and the verification accuracy.

/pdf/fingerprint-image-enhancement-algorithm-and-performance-405diava9j.pdf

Fingerprint image enhancement: algorithm and performance evaluation

The objective of this paper is to give a comprehensive introduction to applied cryptography with an engineer or computer scientist in mind. The emphasis is on the knowledge needed to create practical systems which supports integrity, confidentiality, or authenticity. Topics covered includes an introduction to the concepts in cryptography, attacks against cryptographic systems, key use and handling, random bit generation, encryption modes, and message authentication codes. Recommendations on algorithms and further reading is given in the end of the paper. This paper should make the reader able to build, understand and evaluate system descriptions and designs based on the cryptographic components described in the paper.

[서평]「Applied Cryptography」

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

Advances in Biometrics: Sensors, Algorithms and Systems

The texture in a human iris has been shown to have good individual distinctiveness and thus is suitable for use in reliable identification. A conventional iris recognition system unwraps the iris image and generates a binary feature vector by quantizing the response of selected filters applied to the rows of this image. Typically there are 360 angular sectors, 64 radial rings, and 2 filter responses. This produces a full-length iris code (FLIC) of about 5760 bytes. In contrast, this paper seeks to shrink the representation by finding those regions of the iris that contain the most descriptive potential. We show through experiments that the regions close to the pupil and sclera contribute least to discrimination, and that there is a high correlation between adjacent radial rings. Using these observations we produce a short-length iris code (SLIC) of only 450 bytes. The SLIC is an order of magnitude smaller the FLIC and yet has comparable performance as shown by results on the MMU2 database. The smaller sized representation has the advantage of being easier to store as a barcode, and also reduces the matching time per pair.

SLIC: Short-length iris codes

Research in face recognition has seen tremendous growth over the past couple of decades. Beginning from algorithms capable of performing recognition in constrained environments, existing face recognition systems achieve very high accuracies on large-scale unconstrained face datasets. While upcoming algorithms continue to achieve improved performance, many of them are susceptible to reduced performance under disguise variations, one of the most challenging covariate of face recognition. In this paper, the disguised faces in the wild (DFW) dataset is presented, which contains over 11000 images of 1000 identities with variations across different types of disguise accessories (the DFW dataset link: http://iab-rubric.org/resources/dfw.html ). The images are collected from the Internet, resulting in unconstrained variations similar to real-world settings. This is a unique dataset that contains impersonator and genuine obfuscated face images for each subject. The DFW dataset has been analyzed in terms of three levels of difficulty: 1) easy; 2) medium; and 3) hard, in order to showcase the challenging nature of the problem. The dataset was released as part of the First International Workshop and Competition on DFW at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2018. This paper presents the DFW dataset in detail, including the evaluation protocols, baseline results, performance analysis of the submissions received as part of the competition, and three levels of difficulties of the DFW challenge dataset.

Recognizing Disguised Faces in the Wild

There have been claims of very high information content in iris texture, higher even than in fingerprints. This makes iris attractive for large scale identification systems with possibly millions of people. However, some systems operate by performing N 1:1 matches of the probe against the database. This can get prohibitively expensive in terms of computation as N grows large. Note that for identification systems the per-match time dominants system performance, unlike verification where feature extraction time is the primary component. In this paper we show how to use a short-length iris code to pre-screen a large database and thereby reduce the number of full comparisons needed to a fraction of the total. Since the screening code is much smaller than the full iris code, the time to process the whole database is greatly reduced. As an added benefit, we show that we can use the alignment inferred from the short code to greatly restrict the range of alignments searched for the full code, which further speeds up the system. As we demonstrate in experiments, the two stage approach can reduce the cost and/or time needed by an order of magnitude with very little impact on identification performance.

An efficient, two-stage iris recognition system

Iris segmentation is an important first step for high accuracy iris recognition. A robust iris segmentation procedure should be able to handle noise, occlusion and non-uniform lighting. It also impacts system accuracy - high FAR or FRR values may come directly from bad or wrong segmentations. In this paper a simple new approach for iris segmentation is proposed that tries to integrate quality evaluation ideas directly into the segmentation algorithm. By cutting out all the bad areas, the fraction of the iris that remains can be used as a comprehensive quality measure. This eliminates images with high occlusion (e.g. by the eyelids) as well as images with other quality problems (e.g. low contrast), all using the same mechanism. The proposed method has been tested on a medium-sized (450 image) public database (MMU1) and the score distribution investigated. We also show that, as expected, overall matching accuracy can be improved by rejecting images which have a low quality assessment, thus validating the utility of this measure.

Nalini K. Ratha

Papers

Advances in Biometrics: Sensors, Algorithms and Systems

SLIC: Short-length iris codes

Recognizing Disguised Faces in the Wild

An efficient, two-stage iris recognition system

A new approach for iris segmentation