Showing papers on "Biometrics published in 2017"

Face anti-spoofing using patch and depth-based CNNs

Abstract: The face image is the most accessible biometric modality which is used for highly accurate face recognition systems, while it is vulnerable to many different types of presentation attacks. Face anti-spoofing is a very critical step before feeding the face image to biometric systems. In this paper, we propose a novel two-stream CNN-based approach for face anti-spoofing, by extracting the local features and holistic depth maps from the face images. The local features facilitate CNN to discriminate the spoof patches independent of the spatial face areas. On the other hand, holistic depth map examine whether the input image has a face-like depth. Extensive experiments are conducted on the challenging databases (CASIA-FASD, MSU-USSA, and Replay Attack), with comparison to the state of the art.

Presentation Attack Detection Methods for Face Recognition Systems: A Comprehensive Survey

Abstract: The vulnerability of face recognition systems to presentation attacks (also known as direct attacks or spoof attacks) has received a great deal of interest from the biometric community. The rapid evolution of face recognition systems into real-time applications has raised new concerns about their ability to resist presentation attacks, particularly in unattended application scenarios such as automated border control. The goal of a presentation attack is to subvert the face recognition system by presenting a facial biometric artifact. Popular face biometric artifacts include a printed photo, the electronic display of a facial photo, replaying video using an electronic display, and 3D face masks. These have demonstrated a high security risk for state-of-the-art face recognition systems. However, several presentation attack detection (PAD) algorithms (also known as countermeasures or antispoofing methods) have been proposed that can automatically detect and mitigate such targeted attacks. The goal of this survey is to present a systematic overview of the existing work on face presentation attack detection that has been carried out. This paper describes the various aspects of face presentation attacks, including different types of face artifacts, state-of-the-art PAD algorithms and an overview of the respective research labs working in this domain, vulnerability assessments and performance evaluation metrics, the outcomes of competitions, the availability of public databases for benchmarking new PAD algorithms in a reproducible manner, and finally a summary of the relevant international standardization in this field. Furthermore, we discuss the open challenges and future work that need to be addressed in this evolving field of biometrics.

Face Antispoofing Using Speeded-Up Robust Features and Fisher Vector Encoding

Abstract: The vulnerabilities of face biometric authentication systems to spoofing attacks have received a significant attention during the recent years. Some of the proposed countermeasures have achieved impressive results when evaluated on intratests, i.e., the system is trained and tested on the same database. Unfortunately, most of these techniques fail to generalize well to unseen attacks, e.g., when the system is trained on one database and then evaluated on another database. This is a major concern in biometric antispoofing research that is mostly overlooked. In this letter, we propose a novel solution based on describing the facial appearance by applying Fisher vector encoding on speeded-up robust features extracted from different color spaces. The evaluation of our countermeasure on three challenging benchmark face-spoofing databases, namely the CASIA face antispoofing database, the replay-attack database, and MSU mobile face spoof database, showed excellent and stable performance across all the three datasets. Most importantly, in interdatabase tests, our proposed approach outperforms the state of the art and yields very promising generalization capabilities, even when only limited training data are used.

MasterPrint: Exploring the Vulnerability of Partial Fingerprint-Based Authentication Systems

Abstract: This paper investigates the security of partial fingerprint-based authentication systems, especially when multiple fingerprints of a user are enrolled. A number of consumer electronic devices, such as smartphones, are beginning to incorporate fingerprint sensors for user authentication. The sensors embedded in these devices are generally small and the resulting images are, therefore, limited in size. To compensate for the limited size, these devices often acquire multiple partial impressions of a single finger during enrollment to ensure that at least one of them will successfully match with the image obtained from the user during authentication. Furthermore, in some cases, the user is allowed to enroll multiple fingers, and the impressions pertaining to multiple partial fingers are associated with the same identity (i.e., one user). A user is said to be successfully authenticated if the partial fingerprint obtained during authentication matches any one of the stored templates. This paper investigates the possibility of generating a “MasterPrint,” a synthetic or real partial fingerprint that serendipitously matches one or more of the stored templates for a significant number of users. Our preliminary results on an optical fingerprint data set and a capacitive fingerprint data set indicate that it is indeed possible to locate or generate partial fingerprints that can be used to impersonate a large number of users. In this regard, we expose a potential vulnerability of partial fingerprint-based authentication systems, especially when multiple impressions are enrolled per finger.

Detection of Face Morphing Attacks by Deep Learning

Abstract: Identification by biometric features has become more popular in the last decade. High quality video and fingerprint sensors have become less expensive and are nowadays standard components in many mobile devices. Thus, many devices can be unlocked via fingerprint or face verification. The state of the art accuracy of biometric facial recognition systems prompted even systems that need high security standards like border control at airports to rely on biometric systems. While most biometric facial recognition systems perform quite accurate under a controlled environment, they can easily be tricked by morphing attacks. The concept of a morphing attack is to create a synthetic face image that contains characteristics of two different individuals and to use this image on a document or as reference image in a database. Using this image for authentication, a biometric facial recognition system accepts both individuals. In this paper, we propose a morphing attack detection approach based on convolutional neural networks. We present an automatic morphing pipeline to generate morphing attacks, train neural networks based on this data and analyze their accuracy. The accuracy of different well-known network architectures are compared and the advantage of using pretrained networks compared to networks learned from scratch is studied.

Toward More Accurate Iris Recognition Using Cross-Spectral Matching

Abstract: Iris recognition systems are increasingly deployed for large-scale applications such as national ID programs, which continue to acquire millions of iris images to establish identity among billions. However, with the availability of variety of iris sensors that are deployed for the iris imaging under different illumination/environment, significant performance degradation is expected while matching such iris images acquired under two different domains (either sensor-specific or wavelength-specific). This paper develops a domain adaptation framework to address this problem and introduces a new algorithm using Markov random fields model to significantly improve cross-domain iris recognition. The proposed domain adaptation framework based on the naive Bayes nearest neighbor classification uses a real-valued feature representation, which is capable of learning domain knowledge. Our approach to estimate corresponding visible iris patterns from the synthesis of iris patches in the near infrared iris images achieves outperforming results for the cross-spectral iris recognition. In this paper, a new class of bi-spectral iris recognition system that can simultaneously acquire visible and near infra-red images with pixel-to-pixel correspondences is proposed and evaluated. This paper presents experimental results from three publicly available databases; PolyU cross-spectral iris image database, IIITD CLI and UND database, and achieve outperforming results for the cross-sensor and cross-spectral iris matching.

Unlocking control method and related product

Abstract: Provided are an unlocking control method and a related product. The method comprises: acquiring an environmental parameter (101); acquiring first biometric information (102); determining a first biometric recognition control parameter and a second biometric recognition control parameter corresponding to the environmental parameter (103); performing, according to the first biometric recognition control parameter, first biometric recognition on the first biometric information (104); upon successful recognition of the first biometric information, acquiring second biometric information (105); performing, according to the second biometric recognition control parameter, second biometric recognition on the second biometric information (106); and upon successful recognition of the second biometric information, proceeding to a next unlocking procedure (107). The method and the related product can determine appropriate control parameters for an environment, and control a recognition process on the basis of these control parameters, thereby increasing a successful recognition rate, and improving multi-stage biometric recognition efficiency.

Biometric Systems under Morphing Attacks: Assessment of Morphing Techniques and Vulnerability Reporting

Abstract: With the widespread deployment of biometric recognition systems, the interest in attacking these systems is increasing. One of the easiest ways to circumvent a biometric recognition system are so-called presentation attacks, in which artefacts are presented to the sensor to either impersonate another subject or avoid being recognised. In the recent past, the vulnerabilities of biometric systems to so-called morphing attacks have been unveiled. In such attacks, biometric samples of multiple subjects are merged in the signal or feature domain, in order to allow a successful verification of all contributing subjects against the morphed identity. Being a recent area of research, there is to date no standardised manner to evaluate the vulnerability of biometric systems to these attacks. Hence, it is not yet possible to establish a common benchmark between different morph detection algorithms. In this paper, we tackle this issue proposing new metrics for vulnerability reporting, which build upon our joint experience in researching this challenging attack scenario. In addition, recommendations on the assessment of morphing techniques and morphing detection metrics are given.

ECG databases for biometric systems

Abstract: We perform a systematic review of ECG biometric databases in the literature.We compare the acquisition hardware used to acquire ECG biometric databases.We compare the acquisition protocols adopted by ECG biometric databases.We highlight that an exhaustive database for biometric studies still lacks. Computer-based biometric systems (CBBSs) individual recognition are expert and intelligent systems that are gaining increasing interest in many areas, such as securing financial systems, telecommunications and healthcare applications. The electrocardiogram (ECG) has been used as biometric feature for its low circumvention, large acceptability and uniqueness, thus being at the basis of several CBBSs. As ECG databases collected for clinical applications are not adequate for biometric applications, we have assisted to the development of other repositories of ECG, each one different from the others and highlighting certain issues of ECG-based biometric recognition. Through a systematic framework presented here, we quantitative analyse, evaluate and compare the acquisition hardware and the acquisition protocols of ECG databases available in literature and suited to develop CBBSs. Although the most recent ones, namely CYBHI and UofTDB, result the best for the acquisition hardware and the acquisition protocols, respectively, our survey shows that none is exhaustive for developing a robust and general enough CBBSs. The analysis also highlights the current lack of standardization in this field and the difficulty of performing an effective benchmarking activity. Since a publicly available database is essential for the research community in ECG-based CBBS to correctly assess the performance of existing algorithms or even commercial expert systems, we also discuss here the main features that an "optimal" repository for the intelligent application at hand.

Learning Deep Off-the-Person Heart Biometrics Representations

Abstract: Since the beginning of the new millennium, the electrocardiogram (ECG) has been studied as a biometric trait for security systems and other applications. Recently, with devices such as smartphones and tablets, the acquisition of ECG signal in the off-the-person category has made this biometric signal suitable for real scenarios. In this paper, we introduce the usage of deep learning techniques, specifically convolutional networks, for extracting useful representation for heart biometrics recognition. Particularly, we investigate the learning of feature representations for heart biometrics through two sources: on the raw heartbeat signal and on the heartbeat spectrogram. We also introduce heartbeat data augmentation techniques, which are very important to generalization in the context of deep learning approaches. Using the same experimental setup for six methods in the literature, we show that our proposal achieves state-of-the-art results in the two off-the-person publicly available databases.

Keystroke Biometric Systems for User Authentication

Abstract: Keystroke biometrics (KB) authentication systems are a less popular form of access control, although they are gaining popularity. In recent years, keystroke biometric authentication has been an active area of research due to its low cost and ease of integration with existing security systems. Various researchers have used different methods and algorithms for data collection, feature representation, classification, and performance evaluation to measure the accuracy of the system, and therefore achieved different accuracy rates. Although recently, the support vector machine is most widely used by researchers, it seems that ensemble methods and artificial neural networks yield higher accuracy. Moreover, the overall accuracy of KB is still lower than other biometric authentication systems, such as iris. The objective of this paper is to present a detailed survey of the most recent researches on keystroke dynamic authentication, the methods and algorithms used, the accuracy rate, and the shortcomings of those researches. Finally, the paper identifies some issues that need to be addressed in designing keystroke dynamic biometric systems, makes suggestions to improve the accuracy rate of KB systems, and proposes some possible future research directions.

Towards a Continuous Biometric System Based on ECG Signals Acquired on the Steering Wheel

Abstract: Electrocardiogram signals acquired through a steering wheel could be the key to seamless, highly comfortable, and continuous human recognition in driving settings. This paper focuses on the enhancement of the unprecedented lesser quality of such signals, through the combination of Savitzky-Golay and moving average filters, followed by outlier detection and removal based on normalised cross-correlation and clustering, which was able to render ensemble heartbeats of significantly higher quality. Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and Haar transform features were extracted and fed to decision methods based on Support Vector Machines (SVM), k-Nearest Neighbours (kNN), Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP), and Gaussian Mixture Models - Universal Background Models (GMM-UBM) classifiers, for both identification and authentication tasks. Additional techniques of user-tuned authentication and past score weighting were also studied. The method's performance was comparable to some of the best recent state-of-the-art methods (94.9% identification rate (IDR) and 2.66% authentication equal error rate (EER)), despite lesser results with scarce train data (70.9% IDR and 11.8% EER). It was concluded that the method was suitable for biometric recognition with driving electrocardiogram signals, and could, with future developments, be used on a continuous system in seamless and highly noisy settings.

A survey on behavioral biometric authentication on smartphones

Abstract: Recent research has shown the possibility of using smartphones’ sensors and accessories to extract some behavioral attributes such as touch dynamics, keystroke dynamics and gait recognition. These attributes are known as behavioral biometrics and could be used to verify or identify users implicitly and continuously on smartphones. The authentication systems that have been built based on these behavioral biometric traits are known as active or continuous authentication systems. This paper provides a review of the active authentication systems. We present the components and the operating process of the active authentication systems in general, followed by an overview of the state-of-the-art behavioral biometric traits that used to develop an active authentication systems and their evaluation on smartphones. We discuss the issues, strengths and limitations that associated with each behavioral biometric trait. Also, we introduce a comparative summary between them. Finally, challenges and open research problems are presented in this research field.

DeepGait: A Learning Deep Convolutional Representation for View-Invariant Gait Recognition Using Joint Bayesian

Abstract: Human gait, as a soft biometric, helps to recognize people through their walking. To further improve the recognition performance, we propose a novel video sensor-based gait representation, DeepGait, using deep convolutional features and introduce Joint Bayesian to model view variance. DeepGait is generated by using a pre-trained “very deep” network “D-Net” (VGG-D) without any fine-tuning. For non-view setting, DeepGait outperforms hand-crafted representations (e.g., Gait Energy Image, Frequency-Domain Feature and Gait Flow Image, etc.). Furthermore, for cross-view setting, 256-dimensional DeepGait after PCA significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the OU-ISR large population (OULP) dataset. The OULP dataset, which includes 4007 subjects, makes our result reliable in a statistically reliable way.

Highly Reliable Key Generation From Electrocardiogram (ECG)

Abstract: Traditional passwords are inadequate as cryptographic keys, as they are easy to forge and are vulnerable to guessing. Human biometrics have been proposed as a promising alternative due to their intrinsic nature. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is an emerging biometric that is extremely difficult to forge and circumvent, but has not yet been heavily investigated for cryptographic key generation. ECG has challenges with respect to immunity to noise, abnormalities, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel key generation approach that extracts keys from real-valued ECG features with high reliability and entropy in mind. Our technique, called interval optimized mapping bit allocation (IOMBA), is applied to normal and abnormal ECG signals under multiple session conditions. We also investigate IOMBA in the context of different feature extraction methods, such as wavelet, discrete cosine transform, etc., to find the best method for feature extraction. Experiments of IOMBA show that 217-, 38-, and 100-bit keys with 99.9%, 97.4%, and 95% average reliability and high entropy can be extracted from normal, abnormal, and multiple session ECG signals, respectively. By allowing more errors or lowering entropy, key lengths can be further increased by tunable parameters of IOMBA, which can be useful in other applications. While IOMBA is demonstrated on ECG, it should be useful for other biometrics as well.

Authentication using pulse-response biometrics

Abstract: We propose a new biometric based on the human body's response to an electric square pulse signal, called pulse-response. We explore how this biometric can be used to enhance security in the context of two example applications: (1) an additional authentication mechanism in PIN entry systems, and (2) a means of continuous authentication on a secure terminal. The pulse-response biometric is effective because each human body exhibits a unique response to a signal pulse applied at the palm of one hand, and measured at the palm of the other. Using a prototype setup, we show that users can be correctly identified, with high probability, in a matter of seconds. This identification mechanism integrates well with other established methods and offers a reliable additional layer of security, either on a continuous basis or at login time. We build a proof-of-concept prototype and perform experiments to assess the feasibility of pulse-response as a practical biometric. The results are very encouraging, achieving accuracies of 100% over a static data set, and 88% over a data set with samples taken over several weeks.

Gender recognition and biometric identification using a large dataset of hand images.

Abstract: The human hand possesses distinctive features which can reveal gender information. In addition, the hand is considered one of the primary biometric traits used to identify a person. In this work, we propose a large dataset of human hand images with detailed ground-truth information for gender recognition and biometric identification. The proposed dataset comprises of 11,076 hand images (dorsal and palmar sides), from 190 subjects of different ages under the same lighting conditions. Using this dataset, a convolutional neural network (CNN) can be trained effectively for the gender recognition task. Based on this, we design a two-stream CNN to tackle the gender recognition problem. This trained model is then used as a feature extractor to feed a set of support vector machine classifiers for the biometric identification task. To facilitate access to the proposed dataset and replication of our experiments, the dataset, trained CNN models, and Matlab source code are available at (this https URL).

Soft biometric privacy: Retaining biometric utility of face images while perturbing gender

Abstract: While the primary purpose for collecting biometric data (such as face images, iris, fingerprints, etc.) is for person recognition, yet recent advances in machine learning has shown the possibility of extracting auxiliary information from biometric data such as age, gender, health attributes, etc. These auxiliary attributes are sometimes referred to as soft biometrics. This automatic extraction of soft biometric attributes can happen without the user's agreement, thereby raising several privacy concerns. In this work, we design a technique that modifies a face image such that its gender as assessed by a gender classifier is perturbed, while its biometric utility as assessed by a face matcher is retained. Given an arbitrary biometric matcher and an attribute classifier, the proposed method systematically perturbs the input image such that the output of the attribute classifier is confounded, while the output of the biometric matcher is not significantly impacted. Experimental analysis convey the efficacy of the scheme in imparting gender privacy to face images.

Evaluating Behavioral Biometrics for Continuous Authentication: Challenges and Metrics

Abstract: In recent years, behavioral biometrics have become a popular approach to support continuous authentication systems. Most generally, a continuous authentication system can make two types of errors: false rejects and false accepts. Based on this, the most commonly reported metrics to evaluate systems are the False Reject Rate (FRR) and False Accept Rate (FAR). However, most papers only report the mean of these measures with little attention paid to their distribution. This is problematic as systematic errors allow attackers to perpetually escape detection while random errors are less severe. Using 16 biometric datasets we show that these systematic errors are very common in the wild. We show that some biometrics (such as eye movements) are particularly prone to systematic errors, while others (such as touchscreen inputs) show more even error distributions. Our results also show that the inclusion of some distinctive features lowers average error rates but significantly increases the prevalence of systematic errors. As such, blind optimization of the mean EER (through feature engineering or selection) can sometimes lead to lower security. Following this result we propose the Gini Coefficient (GC) as an additional metric to accurately capture different error distributions. We demonstrate the usefulness of this measure both to compare different systems and to guide researchers during feature selection. In addition to the selection of features and classifiers, some non- functional machine learning methodologies also affect error rates. The most notable examples of this are the selection of training data and the attacker model used to develop the negative class. 13 out of the 25 papers we analyzed either include imposter data in the negative class or randomly sample training data from the entire dataset, with a further 6 not giving any information on the methodology used. Using real-world data we show that both of these decisions lead to significant underestimation of error rates by 63% and 81%, respectively. This is an alarming result, as it suggests that researchers are either unaware of the magnitude of these effects or might even be purposefully attempting to over-optimize their EER without actually improving the system.

Broken Hearted: How To Attack ECG Biometrics.

Abstract: In this work we present a systematic presentation attack against ECG biometrics. We demonstrate the attack’s effectiveness using the Nymi Band, a wrist band that uses electrocardiography (ECG) as a biometric to authenticate the wearer. We instantiate the attack using a hardware-based Arbitrary Waveform Generator (AWG), an AWG software using a computer sound card, and the playback of ECG signals encoded as .wav files using an off-the-shelf audio player. In two sets of experiments we collect data from a total of 41 participants using a variety of ECG monitors, including a medical monitor, a smartphone-based mobile monitor and the Nymi Band itself. We use the first dataset to understand the statistical differences in biometric features that arise from using different measurement devices and modes. Such differences are addressed through the automated derivation of so-called mapping functions, whose purpose is to transform ECG signals from any device in order to resemble the morphology of the signals recorded with the Nymi Band. We use the first dataset to understand the statistical differences in biometric features that arise from using different measurement devices and modes. Such differences are addressed through the automated derivation of so-called mapping functions, whose purpose is to transform ECG signals from any device in order to resemble the morphology of the signals recorded with the Nymi Band.

Multimodal biometric recognition using human ear and palmprint

Abstract: Combining multiple human trait features is a proven and effective strategy for biometric-based personal identification. In this study, the authors investigate the fusion of two biometric modalities, i.e. ear and palmprint, at feature-level. Ear and palmprint patterns are characterised by a rich and stable structure, which provides a large amount of information to discriminate individuals. Local texture descriptors, namely local binary patterns, weber local descriptor, and binarised statistical image features, were used to extract the discriminant features for robust human identification. The authors’ extensive experimental analysis based on the benchmark IIT Delhi-2 ear and IIT Delhi palmprint databases confirmed that the proposed multimodal biometric system is able to increase recognition rates compared with that produced by single-modal biometrics, attaining a recognition rate of 100%.

Radio Biometrics: Human Recognition Through a Wall

Abstract: In this paper, we show the existence of human radio biometrics and present a human identification system that can discriminate individuals even through the walls in a non-line-of-sight condition. Using commodity Wi-Fi devices, the proposed system captures the channel state information (CSI) and extracts human radio biometric information from Wi-Fi signals using the time-reversal (TR) technique. By leveraging the fact that broadband wireless CSI has a significant number of multipaths, which can be altered by human body interferences, the proposed system can recognize individuals in the TR domain without line-of-sight radio. We built a prototype of the TR human identification system using standard Wi-Fi chipsets with $3 \times 3$ multi-in multi-out (MIMO) transmission. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated and validated through multiple experiments. In general, the TR human identification system achieves an accuracy of 98.78% for identifying about a dozen of individuals using a single transmitter and receiver pair. Thanks to the ubiquitousness of Wi-Fi, the proposed system shows the promise for future low-cost low-complexity reliable human identification applications based on radio biometrics.

PPGSecure: Biometric Presentation Attack Detection Using Photopletysmograms

Abstract: Authentication of users by exploiting face as a biometric is gaining widespread traction due to recent advances in face detection and recognition algorithms. While face recognition has made rapid advances in its performance, such facebased authentication systems remain vulnerable to biometric presentation attacks. Biometric presentation attacks are varied and the most common attacks include the presentation of a video or photograph on a display device, the presentation of a printed photograph or the presentation of a face mask resembling the user to be authenticated. In this paper, we present PPGSecure, a novel methodology that relies on camera-based physiology measurements to detect and thwart such biometric presentation attacks. PPGSecure uses a photoplethysmogram (PPG), which is an estimate of vital signs from the small color changes in the video observed due to minor pulsatile variations in the volume of blood flowing to the face. We demonstrate that the temporal frequency spectra of the estimated PPG signal for real live individuals are distinctly different than those of presentation attacks and exploit these differences to detect presentation attacks. We demonstrate that PPGSecure achieves significantly better performance than existing state of the art presentation attack detection methods.