Fabio Narducci

Ubiquitous iris recognition by means of mobile devices

Iris authentication/recognition on mobile devices is feasible.Spatial histograms can be exploited for iris features extraction and matching.Performance of iris segmentation/recognition algorithms is strongly affected by capture conditions.Imaging sensors resolution alone does not necessarily result in higher recognition accuracy. The worldwide diffusion of latest generations mobile devices, namely smartphones and tablets, represents the technological premise to a new wave of applications for which reliable owner identification is becoming a key requirement. This crucial task can be approached by means of biometrics (face, iris or fingerprint) by exploiting high resolution imaging sensors typically built-in on this class of devices, possibly resulting in a ubiquitous platform to verify owner identity during any kind of transaction involving the exchange of sensible data. Among the aforementioned biometrics, iris is known for its inherent invariance and accuracy, though only a few works have explored this topic on mobile devices. In this paper a comprehensive method for iris authentication on mobiles by means of spatial histograms is described. The proposed approach has been tested on the MICHE-I iris dataset, featuring subjects captured indoor and outdoor under controlled and uncontrolled conditions by means of built-in cameras aboard three among the most diffused smartphones/tablets on the market. The experimental results collected, provide an interesting insight about the readiness of mobile technology with regard to iris recognition.

Biometric recognition in surveillance scenarios: a survey

Interest in the security of individuals has increased in recent years. This increase has in turn led to much wider deployment of surveillance cameras worldwide, and consequently, automated surveillance systems research has received more attention from the scientific community than before. Concurrently, biometrics research has become more popular as well, and it is supported by the increasing number of approaches devised to address specific degradation factors of unconstrained environments. Despite these recent efforts, no automated surveillance system that performs reliable biometric recognition in such an environment has become available. Nevertheless, recent developments in human motion analysis and biometric recognition suggest that both can be combined to develop a fully automated system. As such, this paper reviews recent advances in both areas, with a special focus on surveillance scenarios. When compared to previous studies, we highlight two distinct features, i.e., (1) our emphasis is on approaches that are devised to work in unconstrained environments and surveillance scenarios; and (2) biometric recognition is the final goal of the surveillance system, as opposed to behavior analysis, anomaly detection or action recognition.

White Paper on Industrial Applications of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

The paper provides a summary of the contributions to the industrial session at ICIAP2013, describing a few practical applications of Video Analy- sis, in the Surveillance and Security field. The session has been organized to stimulate an open discussion within the scientific community of CVPR on new emerging research areas which deserve particular attention, and may contribute to the improvement of industrial applications in the near future.

Fast Iris Recognition on Smartphone by means of Spatial Histograms

The iris has been proposed as a highly reliable and stable biometric identifier for person authentication/recognition about two decades ago. Since then, most work in the field has been focused on segmentation and matching algorithms able to work on pictures of whole face or eye region typically captured at close distance, while preserving recognition accuracy. In this paper we present an iris matching algorithm based on spatial histograms that, while showing good recognition performance on some of the most referenced public iris dataset, is also able to perform a one-to-one comparison in a small amount of time thanks to its low computing load, thus resulting particularly suited to iris recognition applications on mobile devices.

Quis-Campi: Extending in the Wild Biometric Recognition to Surveillance Environments

Efforts in biometrics are being held into extending robust recognition techniques to in the wild scenarios. Nonetheless, and despite being a very attractive goal, human identification in the surveillance context remains an open problem. In this paper, we introduce a novel biometric system – Quis-Campi – that effectively bridges the gap between surveillance and biometric recognition while having a minimum amount of operational restrictions. We propose a fully automated surveillance system for human recognition purposes, attained by combining human detection and tracking, further enhanced by a PTZ camera that delivers data with enough quality to perform biometric recognition. Along with the system concept, implementation details for both hardware and software modules are provided, as well as preliminary results over a real scenario.

Mobile Iris CHallenge Evaluation II: Results from the ICPR competition

The growing interest for mobile biometrics stems from the increasing need to secure personal data and services, which are often stored or accessed from there. Modern user mobile devices, with acquisition and computation resources to support related operations, are nowadays widely available. This makes this research topic very attracting and promising. Iris recognition plays a major role in this scenario. However, mobile biometrics still suffer from some hindering factors. The resolution of captured images and the computational power are not comparable to desktop systems yet. Furthermore, the acquisition setting is generally uncontrolled, with users who are not that expert to autonomously generate biometric samples of sufficient quality. Mobile Iris CHallenge Evaluation aims at providing a testbed to assess the progress of mobile iris recognition, and to evaluate the extent of its present limitations. This paper presents the results of the competition launched at the 2016 edition of the International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR).

Insights into the results of MICHE I - Mobile Iris CHallenge Evaluation

Abstract Mobile biometrics technologies are nowadays the new frontier for secure use of data and services, and are considered particularly important due to the massive use of handheld devices in the entire world. Among the biometric traits with potential to be used in mobile settings, the iris/ocular region is a natural candidate, even considering that further advances in the technology are required to meet the operational requirements of such ambitious environments. Aiming at promoting these advances, we organized the Mobile Iris Challenge Evaluation (MICHE)-I contest. This paper presents a comparison of the performance of the participant methods by various Figures of Merit (FoMs). A particular attention is devoted to the identification of the image covariates that are likely to cause a decrease in the performance levels of the compared algorithms. Among these factors, interoperability among different devices plays an important role. The methods (or parts of them) implemented by the analyzed approaches are classified into segmentation (S), which was the main target of MICHE-I, and recognition (R). The paper reports both the results observed for either S or R, and also for different recombinations (S+R) of such methods. Last but not least, we also present the results obtained by multi-classifier strategies.

Kurtosis and skewness at pixel level as input for SOM networks to iris recognition on mobile devices

Statistical operators of Kurtosis and Skewness at pixel level for iris recognition.Self Organizing Map (SOM) for clustering pixels of iris images.The size of the network does not significantly impact on recognition performances.Environmental noise critically affects the achievable recognition rate on mobile. The increasing popularity of smartphones amongst the population laid the basis for a wide range of applications aimed at security and privacy protection. Very modern mobile devices have recently demonstrated the feasibility of using a camera sensor to access the system without typing any alphanumerical password. In this work, we present a method that implements iris recognition in the visible spectrum through unsupervised learning by means of Self Organizing Maps (SOM). The proposed method uses a SOM network to cluster iris features at pixel level. The discriminative feature map is obtained by using RGB data of the iris combined with the statistical descriptors of kurtosis and skewness. An experimental analysis on MICHE-I and UBIRISv1 datasets demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of the algorithm, which has been specifically designed to require low processing power in compliance with the limited capability of common mobile devices.

An Efficient Implementation of the Algorithm by Lukáš et al. on Hadoop

Apache Hadoop offers the possibility of coding full-fledged distributed applications with very low programming efforts. However, the resulting implementations may suffer from some performance bottlenecks that nullify the potential of a distributed system. An engineering methodology based on the implementation of smart optimizations driven by a careful profiling activity may lead to a much better experimental performance as shown in this paper.

SKIPSOM: Skewness & kurtosis of iris pixels in Self Organizing Maps for iris recognition on mobile devices

In the last fifteen years, smartphones have become very popular amongst the population, with the subsequent development of dozens of applications aimed at providing security to these portable devices. Nowadays, the cutting edge devices are also provided with biometric sensors (e.g., fingerprint sensors) allowing the users to access them without using the out-of-date alphanumerical password. In this work, we present a method that realizes iris recognition by means of Self Organizing Maps (SOM). In order to obtain a better refined and discriminative feature map, the RGB data of the iris, previously segmented, have been combined with two statistical descriptors. The algorithm has been designed specifically to require a low processing power, making it an ideal choice in the context of mobile devices.