Richa Singh

Bio: Richa Singh is an academic researcher from Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur. The author has contributed to research in topics: Facial recognition system & Deep learning. The author has an hindex of 53, co-authored 422 publications receiving 9145 citations. Previous affiliations of Richa Singh include Indian Institutes of Technology & University of Virginia.

Recognizing disguised faces: human and machine evaluation.

Abstract: Face verification, though an easy task for humans, is a long-standing open research area. This is largely due to the challenging covariates, such as disguise and aging, which make it very hard to accurately verify the identity of a person. This paper investigates human and machine performance for recognizing/verifying disguised faces. Performance is also evaluated under familiarity and match/mismatch with the ethnicity of observers. The findings of this study are used to develop an automated algorithm to verify the faces presented under disguise variations. We use automatically localized feature descriptors which can identify disguised face patches and account for this information to achieve improved matching accuracy. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on the IIIT-Delhi Disguise database that contains images pertaining to 75 subjects with different kinds of disguise variations. The experiments suggest that the proposed algorithm can outperform a popular commercial system and evaluates them against humans in matching disguised face images.

Detecting Facial Retouching Using Supervised Deep Learning

Abstract: Digitally altering, or retouching, face images is a common practice for images on social media, photo sharing websites, and even identification cards when the standards are not strictly enforced. This research demonstrates the effect of digital alterations on the performance of automatic face recognition, and also introduces an algorithm to classify face images as original or retouched with high accuracy. We first introduce two face image databases with unaltered and retouched images. Face recognition experiments performed on these databases show that when a retouched image is matched with its original image or an unaltered gallery image, the identification performance is considerably degraded, with a drop in matching accuracy of up to 25%. However, when images are retouched with the same style, the matching accuracy can be misleadingly high in comparison with matching original images. To detect retouching in face images, a novel supervised deep Boltzmann machine algorithm is proposed. It uses facial parts to learn discriminative features to classify face images as original or retouched. The proposed approach for classifying images as original or retouched yields an accuracy of over 87% on the data sets introduced in this paper and over 99% on three other makeup data sets used by previous researchers. This is a substantial increase in accuracy over the previous state-of-the-art algorithm, which has shown <50% accuracy in classifying original and retouched images from the ND-IIITD retouched faces database.

Disguise detection and face recognition in visible and thermal spectrums

Abstract: Face verification, though for humans seems to be an easy task, is a long-standing research area. With challenging covariates such as disguise or face obfuscation, automatically verifying the identity of a person is assumed to be very hard. This paper explores the feasibility of face verification under disguise variations using multi-spectrum (visible and thermal) face images. We propose a framework, termed as Aravrta1, which classifies the local facial regions of both visible and thermal face images into biometric (regions without disguise) and non-biometric (regions with disguise) classes. The biometric patches are then used for facial feature extraction and matching. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated on the IHTD In and Beyond Visible Spectrum Disguise database that is prepared by the authors and contains images pertaining to 75 subjects with different kinds of disguise variations. The experimental results suggest that the proposed framework improves the performance compared to existing algorithms, however there is a need for more research to address this important covariate.

Robust biometric image watermarking for fingerprint and face template protection

Abstract: This paper presents a combined DWT and LSB based biometric watermarking algorithm that securely embeds a face template in a fingerprint image. The proposed algorithm is robust to geometric and frequency attacks and protects the integrity of both the face template and the fingerprint image. Experimental results performed on a database of 750 face and 750 fingerprint images show that the algorithm has the advantages of both the existing DWT and LSB based algorithms. A multimodal biometric algorithm is used as a metric to evaluate the combined performance of both face and fingerprint recognition.

Face anti-spoofing using Haralick features

Abstract: Face spoofing can be performed in a variety of ways such as replay attack, print attack, and mask attack to deceive an automated recognition algorithm. To mitigate the effect of spoofing attempts, face anti-spoofing approaches aim to distinguish between genuine samples and spoofed samples. The focus of this paper is to detect spoofing attempts via Haralick texture features. The proposed algorithm extracts block-wise Haralick texture features from redundant discrete wavelet transformed frames obtained from a video. Dimensionality of the feature vector is reduced using principal component analysis and two class classification is performed using support vector machine. Results on the 3DMAD database show that the proposed algorithm achieves state-of-the-art results for both frame-based and video-based approaches, including 100% accuracy on video-based spoofing detection. Further, the results are reported on existing benchmark databases on which the proposed feature extraction framework archives state-of-the-art performance.

I and i

Abstract: There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality. Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …