Showing papers on "Biometrics published in 2012"

On the effectiveness of local binary patterns in face anti-spoofing

Abstract: Spoofing attacks are one of the security traits that biometric recognition systems are proven to be vulnerable to. When spoofed, a biometric recognition system is bypassed by presenting a copy of the biometric evidence of a valid user. Among all biometric modalities, spoofing a face recognition system is particularly easy to perform: all that is needed is a simple photograph of the user. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting face spoofing attacks. In particular, we inspect the potential of texture features based on Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and their variations on three types of attacks: printed photographs, and photos and videos displayed on electronic screens of different sizes. For this purpose, we introduce REPLAY-ATTACK, a novel publicly available face spoofing database which contains all the mentioned types of attacks. We conclude that LBP, with ∼15% Half Total Error Rate, show moderate discriminability when confronted with a wide set of attack types.

Biometric Authentication and Identification using Keystroke Dynamics: A Survey

Abstract: Dependence on computers to store and process sensitive information has made it necessary to secure them from intruders. A behavioral biometric such as keystroke dynamics which makes use of the typing cadence of an individual can be used to strengthen existing security techniques effectively and cheaply. Due to the ballistic (semi-autonomous) nature of the typing behavior it is difficult to impersonate, making it useful as abiometric. Therefore in this paper, we provide a basic background of the psychological basis behind the use of keystroke dynamics. We also discuss the data acquisition methods, approaches and the performance of the methods used by researchers on standard computer keyboards. In this survey, we find that the use and acceptance of this biometric could be increased by development of standardized databases, assignment of nomenclature for features, development of common data interchange formats, establishment of protocols for evaluating methods, and resolution of privacy issues.

Biometric-rich gestures: a novel approach to authentication on multi-touch devices

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel multi-touch gesture-based authentication technique. We take advantage of the multi-touch surface to combine biometric techniques with gestural input. We defined a comprehensive set of five-finger touch gestures, based upon classifying movement characteristics of the center of the palm and fingertips, and tested them in a user study combining biometric data collection with usability questions. Using pattern recognition techniques, we built a classifier to recognize unique biometric gesture characteristics of an individual. We achieved a 90% accuracy rate with single gestures, and saw significant improvement when multiple gestures were performed in sequence. We found user ratings of a gestures desirable characteristics (ease, pleasure, excitement) correlated with a gestures actual biometric recognition rate - that is to say, user ratings aligned well with gestural security, in contrast to typical text-based passwords. Based on these results, we conclude that multi-touch gestures show great promise as an authentication mechanism.

ECG Biometric Recognition: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract: The electrocardiogram (ECG) is an emerging biometric modality that has seen about 13 years of development in peer-reviewed literature, and as such deserves a systematic review and discussion of the associated methods and findings. In this paper, we review most of the techniques that have been applied to the use of the electrocardiogram for biometric recognition. In particular, we categorize the methodologies based on the features and the classification schemes. Finally, a comparative analysis of the authentication performance of a few of the ECG biometric systems is presented, using our inhouse database. The comparative study includes the cases where training and testing data come from the same and different sessions (days). The authentication results show that most of the algorithms that have been proposed for ECG-based biometrics perform well when the training and testing data come from the same session. However, when training and testing data come from different sessions, a performance degradation occurs. Multiple training sessions were incorporated to diminish the loss in performance. That notwithstanding, only a few of the proposed ECG recognition algorithms appear to be able to support performance improvement due to multiple training sessions. Only three of these algorithms produced equal error rates (EERs) in the single digits, including an EER of 5.5% using a method proposed by us.

Multibiometric Cryptosystems Based on Feature-Level Fusion

Abstract: Multibiometric systems are being increasingly de- ployed in many large-scale biometric applications (e.g., FBI-IAFIS, UIDAI system in India) because they have several advantages such as lower error rates and larger population coverage compared to unibiometric systems. However, multibiometric systems require storage of multiple biometric templates (e.g., fingerprint, iris, and face) for each user, which results in increased risk to user privacy and system security. One method to protect individual templates is to store only the secure sketch generated from the corresponding template using a biometric cryptosystem. This requires storage of multiple sketches. In this paper, we propose a feature-level fusion framework to simultaneously protect multiple templates of a user as a single secure sketch. Our main contributions include: (1) practical implementation of the proposed feature-level fusion framework using two well-known biometric cryptosystems, namery,fuzzy vault and fuzzy commitment, and (2) detailed analysis of the trade-off between matching accuracy and security in the proposed multibiometric cryptosystems based on two different databases (one real and one virtual multimodal database), each containing the three most popular biometric modalities, namely, fingerprint, iris, and face. Experimental results show that both the multibiometric cryptosystems proposed here have higher security and matching performance compared to their unibiometric counterparts.

LBP - TOP based countermeasure against face spoofing attacks

Abstract: User authentication is an important step to protect information and in this field face biometrics is advantageous. Face biometrics is natural, easy to use and less human-invasive. Unfortunately, recent work has revealed that face biometrics is vulnerable to spoofing attacks using low-tech cheap equipments. This article presents a countermeasure against such attacks based on the LBP−TOP operator combining both space and time information into a single multiresolution texture descriptor. Experiments carried out with the REPLAY ATTACK database show a Half Total Error Rate (HTER) improvement from 15.16% to 7.60%.

System and method for speaker recognition on mobile devices

Abstract: A speaker recognition system for authenticating a mobile device user includes an enrollment and learning software module, a voice biometric authentication software module, and a secure software application. Upon request by a user of the mobile device, the enrollment and learning software module displays text prompts to the user, receives speech utterances from the user, and produces a voice biometric print. The enrollment and training software module determines when a voice biometric print has met at least a quality threshold before storing it on the mobile device. The secure software application prompts a user requiring authentication to repeat an utterance based at least on an attribute of a selected voice biometric print, receives a corresponding utterance, requests the voice biometric authentication software module to verify the identity of the second user using the utterance, and, if the user is authenticated, imports the voice biometric print.

Advanced optical correlation and digital methods for pattern matching—50th anniversary of Vander Lugt matched filter

Abstract: On the verge of the 50th anniversary of Vander Lugt’s formulation for pattern matching based on matched filtering and optical correlation, we acknowledge the very intense research activity developed in the field of correlation-based pattern recognition during this period of time. The paper reviews some domains that appeared as emerging fields in the last years of the 20th century and have been developed later on in the 21st century. Such is the case of three-dimensional (3D) object recognition, biometric pattern matching, optical security and hybrid optical–digital processors. 3D object recognition is a challenging case of multidimensional image recognition because of its implications in the recognition of real-world objects independent of their perspective. Biometric recognition is essentially pattern recognition for which the personal identification is based on the authentication of a specific physiological characteristic possessed by the subject (e.g. fingerprint, face, iris, retina, and multifactor combinations). Biometric recognition often appears combined with encryption–decryption processes to secure information. The optical implementations of correlation-based pattern recognition processes still rely on the 4f-correlator, the joint transform correlator, or some of their variants. But the many applications developed in the field have been pushing the systems for a continuous improvement of their architectures and algorithms, thus leading towards merged optical–digital solutions.

Personalization and user verification in wearable systems using biometric walking patterns

Abstract: In this article, a novel technique for user's authentication and verification using gait as a biometric unobtrusive pattern is proposed. The method is based on a two stages pipeline. First, a general activity recognition classifier is personalized for an specific user using a small sample of her/his walking pattern. As a result, the system is much more selective with respect to the new walking pattern. A second stage verifies whether the user is an authorized one or not. This stage is defined as a one-class classification problem. In order to solve this problem, a four-layer architecture is built around the geometric concept of convex hull. This architecture allows to improve robustness to outliers, modeling non-convex shapes, and to take into account temporal coherence information. Two different scenarios are proposed as validation with two different wearable systems. First, a custom high-performance wearable system is built and used in a free environment. A second dataset is acquired from an Android-based commercial device in a `wild' scenario with rough terrains, adversarial conditions, crowded places and obstacles. Results on both systems and datasets are very promising, reducing the verification error rates by an order of magnitude with respect to the state-of-the-art technologies.

Authentication of Smartphone Users Based on the Way They Walk Using k-NN Algorithm

Abstract: Accelerometer-based biometric gait recognition offers a convenient way to authenticate users on their mobile devices. Modern smartphones contain in-built accelerometers which can be used as sensors to acquire the necessary data while the subjects are walking. Hence, no additional costs for special sensors are imposed to the user. In this publication we extract several features from the gait data and use the k-Nearest Neighbour algorithm for classification. We show that this algorithm yields a better biometric performance than the machine learning algorithms we previously used for classification, namely Hidden Markov Models and Support Vector Machines. We implemented the presented method on a smartphone and demonstrate that it is efficient enough to be applied in practice.

Periocular recognition: Analysis of performance degradation factors

Abstract: Among the available biometric traits such as face, iris and fingerprint, there is an active research being carried out in the direction of unconstrained biometrics. Periocular recognition has proved its effectiveness and is regarded as complementary to iris recognition. The main objectives of this paper are three-fold: 1) to announce the availability of periocular dataset, which has a variability in terms of scale change (due to camera-subject distance), pose variation and non-uniform illumination; 2) to investigate the performance of periocular recognition methods with the presence of various degradation factors; 3) propose a new initialization strategy for the definition of the periocular region-of-interest (ROI), based on the geometric mean of eye corners. Our experiments confirm that performance can be consistently improved by this initialization method, when compared to the classical technique.

Keystroke dynamics for user authentication

Abstract: In this paper we investigate the problem of user authentication using keystroke biometrics. A new distance metric that is effective in dealing with the challenges intrinsic to keystroke dynamics data, i.e., scale variations, feature interactions and redundancies, and outliers is proposed. Our keystroke biometrics algorithms based on this new distance metric are evaluated on the CMU keystroke dynamics benchmark dataset and are shown to be superior to algorithms using traditional distance metrics.

Biometric authentication on a mobile device: a study of user effort, error and task disruption

Abstract: We examine three biometric authentication modalities -- voice, face and gesture -- as well as password entry, on a mobile device, to explore the relative demands on user time, effort, error and task disruption. Our laboratory study provided observations of user actions, strategies, and reactions to the authentication methods. Face and voice biometrics conditions were faster than password entry. Speaking a PIN was the fastest for biometric sample entry, but short-term memory recall was better in the face verification condition. None of the authentication conditions were considered very usable. In conditions that combined two biometric entry methods, the time to acquire the biometric samples was shorter than if acquired separately but they were very unpopular and had high memory task error rates. These quantitative results demonstrate cognitive and motor differences between biometric authentication modalities, and inform policy decisions in selecting authentication methods.

Method and system for multi-factor biometric authentication

Abstract: An approach for enabling multi-factor biometric authentication of a user of a mobile device is described. A biometric authenticator captures, via a mobile device, first and second biometric data for a user. The biometric authentication further associates the first biometric data and the second biometric data. The biometric authenticator then initiates a multi-factor authentication procedure that utilizes the first biometric data and the second biometric data to authenticate the user based on the association.

Security evaluation of biometric authentication systems under real spoofing attacks

Abstract: Multimodal biometric systems are commonly believed to be more robust to spoofing attacks than unimodal systems, as they combine information coming from different biometric traits. Recent work has shown that multimodal systems can be misled by an impostor even by spoofing only one biometric trait. This result was obtained under a `worst-case` scenario, by assuming that the distribution of fake scores is identical to that of genuine scores (i.e. the attacker is assumed to be able to perfectly replicate a genuine biometric trait). This assumption also allows one to evaluate the robustness of score fusion rules against spoofing attacks, and to design robust fusion rules, without the need of actually fabricating spoofing attacks. However, whether and to what extent the `worst-case` scenario is representative of real spoofing attacks is still an open issue. In this study, we address this issue by an experimental investigation carried out on several data sets including real spoofing attacks, related to a multimodal verification system based on face and fingerprint biometrics. On the one hand, our results confirm that multimodal systems are vulnerable to attacks against a single biometric trait. On the other hand, they show that the `worst-case` scenario can be too pessimistic. This can lead to two conservative choices, if the `worst-case` assumption is used for designing a robust multimodal system. Therefore developing methods for evaluating the robustness of multimodal systems against spoofing attacks, and for designing robust ones, remain a very relevant open issue.

Unified Framework for Automated Iris Segmentation Using Distantly Acquired Face Images

Abstract: Remote human identification using iris biometrics has high civilian and surveillance applications and its success requires the development of robust segmentation algorithm to automatically extract the iris region. This paper presents a new iris segmentation framework which can robustly segment the iris images acquired using near infrared or visible illumination. The proposed approach exploits multiple higher order local pixel dependencies to robustly classify the eye region pixels into iris or noniris regions. Face and eye detection modules have been incorporated in the unified framework to automatically provide the localized eye region from facial image for iris segmentation. We develop robust postprocessing operations algorithm to effectively mitigate the noisy pixels caused by the misclassification. Experimental results presented in this paper suggest significant improvement in the average segmentation errors over the previously proposed approaches, i.e., 47.5%, 34.1%, and 32.6% on UBIRIS.v2, FRGC, and CASIA.v4 at-a-distance databases, respectively. The usefulness of the proposed approach is also ascertained from recognition experiments on three different publicly available databases.

Biometric Authentication: System Security and User Privacy

Abstract: While biometric systems aren't foolproof, the research community has made significant strides to identify vulnerabilities and develop measures to counter them.

Biometric Recognition: An Overview

Abstract: Prevailing methods of human identification based on credentials (identification documents and PIN) are not able to meet the growing demands for stringent security in applications such as national ID cards, border crossings, government benefits, and access control. As a result, biometric recognition, or simply biometrics, which is based on physiological and behavioural characteristics of a person, is being increasingly adopted and mapped to rapidly growing person identification applications. Unlike credentials (documents and PIN), biometric traits (e.g., fingerprint, face, and iris) cannot be lost, stolen, or easily forged; they are also considered to be persistent and unique. Use of biometrics is not new; fingerprints have been successfully used for over 100 years in law enforcement and forensics to identify and apprehend criminals. But, as biometrics permeates our society, this recognition technology faces new challenges. The design and suitability of biometric technology for person identification depends on the application requirements. These requirements are typically specified in terms of identification accuracy, throughput, user acceptance, system security, robustness, and return on investment. The next generation biometric technology must overcome many hurdles and challenges to improve the recognition accuracy. These include ability to handle poor quality and incomplete data, achieve scalability to accommodate hundreds of millions of users, ensure interoperability, and protect user privacy while reducing system cost and enhancing system integrity. This chapter presents an overview of biometrics, some of the emerging biometric technologies and their limitations, and examines future challenges.

A Unified Framework for Biometric Expert Fusion Incorporating Quality Measures

Abstract: This paper proposes a unified framework for quality-based fusion of multimodal biometrics. Quality-dependent fusion algorithms aim to dynamically combine several classifier (biometric expert) outputs as a function of automatically derived (biometric) sample quality. Quality measures used for this purpose quantify the degree of conformance of biometric samples to some predefined criteria known to influence the system performance. Designing a fusion classifier to take quality into consideration is difficult because quality measures cannot be used to distinguish genuine users from impostors, i.e., they are nondiscriminative yet still useful for classification. We propose a general Bayesian framework that can utilize the quality information effectively. We show that this framework encompasses several recently proposed quality-based fusion algorithms in the literature-Nandakumar et al., 2006; Poh et al., 2007; Kryszczuk and Drygajo, 2007; Kittler et al., 2007; Alonso-Fernandez, 2008; Maurer and Baker, 2007; Poh et al., 2010. Furthermore, thanks to the systematic study concluded herein, we also develop two alternative formulations of the problem, leading to more efficient implementation (with fewer parameters) and achieving performance comparable to, or better than, the state of the art. Last but not least, the framework also improves the understanding of the role of quality in multiple classifier combination.

Quality Measures in Biometric Systems

Abstract: Biometric technology has been increasingly deployed in the past decade, offering greater security and convenience than traditional methods of personal recognition. Although biometric signals' quality heavily affects a biometric system's performance, prior research on evaluating quality is limited. Quality is a critical issue in security, especially in adverse scenarios involving surveillance cameras, forensics, portable devices, or remote access through the Internet. This article analyzes what factors negatively impact biometric quality, how to overcome them, and how to incorporate quality measures into biometric systems. A review of the state of the art in these matters gives an overall framework for the challenges of biometric quality.

Video-Based Face Spoofing Detection through Visual Rhythm Analysis

Abstract: Recent advances on biometrics, information forensics, and security have improved the accuracy of biometric systems, mainly those based on facial information. However, an ever-growing challenge is the vulnerability of such systems to impostor attacks, in which users without access privileges try to authenticate themselves as valid users. In this work, we present a solution to video-based face spoofing to biometric systems. Such type of attack is characterized by presenting a video of a real user to the biometric system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt of dealing with video-based face spoofing based in the analysis of global information that is invariant to video content. Our approach takes advantage of noise signatures generated by the recaptured video to distinguish between fake and valid access. To capture the noise and obtain a compact representation, we use the Fourier spectrum followed by the computation of the visual rhythm and extraction of the gray-level co-occurrence matrices, used as feature descriptors. Results show the effectiveness of the proposed approach to distinguish between valid and fake users for video-based spoofing with near-perfect classification results.

Fingerprint template protection with minutiae-based bit-string for security and privacy preserving

Abstract: Recently, biometric template protection has received great attention from the research community due to the security and privacy concerns for biometric template. Although a number of biometric template protection methods have been reported, it is still a challenging task to devise a scheme which satisfies all of the four template protection criteria namely diversity, revocability, non-invertibility and performance. In this paper, a method is proposed to generate a revocable fingerprint template in terms of bit-string from a set of minutiae points via a polar grid based 3-tuple quantization technique. Two merits of the proposed method are outlined, namely alignment-free and performance. Four publicly available benchmark datasets: FVC2002 DB1, DB2 and FVC2004 DB1, DB2 are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed method. Besides, the diversity, revocability, non-invertibility criteria are also analyzed.

System and method for enabling continuous or instantaneous identity recognition based on physiological biometric signals

Abstract: The present invention is a biometric security system and method operable to authenticate one or more individuals using physiological signals. The method and system may comprise one of the following modes: instantaneous identity recognition (MR); or continuous identity recognition (CIR). The present invention may include a methodology and framework for biometric recognition using physiological signals and may utilize a machine learning utility. The machine learning utility may be presented and adapted to the needs of different application environments which constitute different application frameworks. The present invention may further incorporate a method and system for continuous authentication using physiological signals and a means of estimating relevant parameters.

Evaluation of Electrocardiogram for Biometric Authentication

Abstract: This paper presents an evaluation of a new biometric electrocardiogram (ECG) for individual authentication. We report the potential of ECG as a biometric and address the research concerns to use ECG-enabled biometric authentication system across a range of conditions. We present a method to delineate ECG waveforms and their end fiducials from each heartbeat. A new authentication strategy is proposed in this work, which uses the delineated features and taking decision for the identity of an individual with respect to the template database on the basis of match scores. Performance of the system is evaluated in a unimodal framework and in the multibiometric framework where ECG is combined with the face biometric and with the fingerprint biometric. The equal error rate (EER) result of the unimodal system is reported to 10.8%, while the EER results of the multibiometric systems are reported to 3.02% and 1.52%, respectively for the systems when ECG combined with the face biometric and ECG combined with the fingerprint biometric. The EER results of the combined systems prove that the ECG has an excellent source of supplementary information to a multibiometric system, despite it shows moderate performance in a unimodal framework. We critically evaluate the concerns involved to use ECG as a biometric for individual authentication such as, the lack of standardization of signal features and the presence of acquisition variations that make the data representation more difficult. In order to determine large scale performance, individuality of ECG remains to be examined.

Multimodal Biometric Person Authentication : A Review

Abstract: This paper provides a review of multimodal biometric person authentication systems. The paper begins with an introduction to biometrics, its advantages, disadvantages, and authentication system using them. A brief discussion on the selection criteria of different biometrics is also given. This is followed by a discussion on the classification of biometric systems, their strengths, and limitations. Detailed descriptions on the multimodal biometric person authentication system, different modes of operation, and integration scenarios are also provided. Considering the importance of information fusion in multi-biometric approach, a separate section is dedicated on the different levels of fusion, which include sensor-level, feature-level, score-level, rank-level, and abstract-level fusions, and also different rules of fusion. This paper also presents an overview of some performance parameters and error rates for biometric person authentication systems. A separate section is devoted to the recent trends...

An embedded real-time finger-vein recognition system for mobile devices

Abstract: With the development of consumer electronics, the demand for simple, convenient, and high-security authentication systems for protecting private information stored in mobile devices has steadily increased In consideration of emerging requirements for information protection, biometrics, which uses human physiological or behavioral features for personal identification, has been extensively studied as a solution to security issues However, most existing biometric systems have high complexity in time or space or both, and are thus not suitable for mobile devices In this paper, we propose a real-time embedded finger-vein recognition system for authentication on mobile devices The system is implemented on a DSP platform and equipped with a novel finger-vein recognition algorithm The proposed system takes only about 08 seconds to verify one input finger-vein sample and achieves an equal error rate (EER) of 007% on a database of 100 subjects The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed finger-vein recognition system is qualified for authentication on mobile devices

Toward Covert Iris Biometric Recognition: Experimental Results From the NICE Contests

Abstract: This paper announces and discusses the experimental results from the Noisy Iris Challenge Evaluation (NICE), an iris biometric evaluation initiative that received worldwide participation and whose main innovation is the use of heavily degraded data acquired in the visible wavelength and uncontrolled setups, with subjects moving and at widely varying distances. The NICE contest included two separate phases: 1) the NICE.I evaluated iris segmentation and noise detection techniques and 2) the NICE:II evaluated encoding and matching strategies for biometric signatures. Further, we give the performance values observed when fusing recognition methods at the score level, which was observed to outperform any isolated recognition strategy. These results provide an objective estimate of the potential of such recognition systems and should be regarded as reference values for further improvements of this technology, which-if successful-may significantly broaden the applicability of iris biometric systems to domains where the subjects cannot be expected to cooperate.