Fernando Alonso-Fernandez

A Comparative Study of Fingerprint Image-Quality Estimation Methods

One of the open issues in fingerprint verification is the lack of robustness against image-quality degradation. Poor-quality images result in spurious and missing features, thus degrading the performance of the overall system. Therefore, it is important for a fingerprint recognition system to estimate the quality and validity of the captured fingerprint images. In this work, we review existing approaches for fingerprint image-quality estimation, including the rationale behind the published measures and visual examples showing their behavior under different quality conditions. We have also tested a selection of fingerprint image-quality estimation algorithms. For the experiments, we employ the BioSec multimodal baseline corpus, which includes 19 200 fingerprint images from 200 individuals acquired in two sessions with three different sensors. The behavior of the selected quality measures is compared, showing high correlation between them in most cases. The effect of low-quality samples in the verification performance is also studied for a widely available minutiae-based fingerprint matching system.

The Multiscenario Multienvironment BioSecure Multimodal Database (BMDB)

A new multimodal biometric database designed and acquired within the framework of the European BioSecure Network of Excellence is presented. It is comprised of more than 600 individuals acquired simultaneously in three scenarios: 1 over the Internet, 2 in an office environment with desktop PC, and 3 in indoor/outdoor environments with mobile portable hardware. The three scenarios include a common part of audio/video data. Also, signature and fingerprint data have been acquired both with desktop PC and mobile portable hardware. Additionally, hand and iris data were acquired in the second scenario using desktop PC. Acquisition has been conducted by 11 European institutions. Additional features of the BioSecure Multimodal Database (BMDB) are: two acquisition sessions, several sensors in certain modalities, balanced gender and age distributions, multimodal realistic scenarios with simple and quick tasks per modality, cross-European diversity, availability of demographic data, and compatibility with other multimodal databases. The novel acquisition conditions of the BMDB allow us to perform new challenging research and evaluation of either monomodal or multimodal biometric systems, as in the recent BioSecure Multimodal Evaluation campaign. A description of this campaign including baseline results of individual modalities from the new database is also given. The database is expected to be available for research purposes through the BioSecure Association during 2008.

A high performance fingerprint liveness detection method based on quality related features

A new software-based liveness detection approach using a novel fingerprint parameterization based on quality related features is proposed. The system is tested on a highly challenging database comprising over 10,500 real and fake images acquired with five sensors of different technologies and covering a wide range of direct attack scenarios in terms of materials and procedures followed to generate the gummy fingers. The proposed solution proves to be robust to the multi-scenario dataset, and presents an overall rate of 90% correctly classified samples. Furthermore, the liveness detection method presented has the added advantage over previously studied techniques of needing just one image from a finger to decide whether it is real or fake. This last characteristic provides the method with very valuable features as it makes it less intrusive, more user friendly, faster and reduces its implementation costs.

BiosecurID: a multimodal biometric database

A new multimodal biometric database, acquired in the framework of the BiosecurID project, is presented together with the description of the acquisition setup and protocol. The database includes eight unimodal biometric traits, namely: speech, iris, face (still images, videos of talking faces), handwritten signature and handwritten text (on-line dynamic signals, off-line scanned images), fingerprints (acquired with two different sensors), hand (palmprint, contour-geometry) and keystroking. The database comprises 400 subjects and presents features such as: realistic acquisition scenario, balanced gender and population distributions, availability of information about particular demographic groups (age, gender, handedness), acquisition of replay attacks for speech and keystroking, skilled forgeries for signatures, and compatibility with other existing databases. All these characteristics make it very useful in research and development of unimodal and multimodal biometric systems.

Benchmarking Quality-Dependent and Cost-Sensitive Score-Level Multimodal Biometric Fusion Algorithms

Automatically verifying the identity of a person by means of biometrics (e.g., face and fingerprint) is an important application in our day-to-day activities such as accessing banking services and security control in airports. To increase the system reliability, several biometric devices are often used. Such a combined system is known as a multimodal biometric system. This paper reports a benchmarking study carried out within the framework of the BioSecure DS2 (Access Control) evaluation campaign organized by the University of Surrey, involving face, fingerprint, and iris biometrics for person authentication, targeting the application of physical access control in a medium-size establishment with some 500 persons. While multimodal biometrics is a well-investigated subject in the literature, there exists no benchmark for a fusion algorithm comparison. Working towards this goal, we designed two sets of experiments: quality-dependent and cost-sensitive evaluation. The quality-dependent evaluation aims at assessing how well fusion algorithms can perform under changing quality of raw biometric images principally due to change of devices. The cost-sensitive evaluation, on the other hand, investigates how well a fusion algorithm can perform given restricted computation and in the presence of software and hardware failures, resulting in errors such as failure-to-acquire and failure-to-match. Since multiple capturing devices are available, a fusion algorithm should be able to handle this nonideal but nevertheless realistic scenario. In both evaluations, each fusion algorithm is provided with scores from each biometric comparison subsystem as well as the quality measures of both the template and the query data. The response to the call of the evaluation campaign proved very encouraging, with the submission of 22 fusion systems. To the best of our knowledge, this campaign is the first attempt to benchmark quality-based multimodal fusion algorithms. In the presence of changing image quality which may be due to a change of acquisition devices and/or device capturing configurations, we observe that the top performing fusion algorithms are those that exploit automatically derived quality measurements. Our evaluation also suggests that while using all the available biometric sensors can definitely increase the fusion performance, this comes at the expense of increased cost in terms of acquisition time, computation time, the physical cost of hardware, and its maintenance cost. As demonstrated in our experiments, a promising solution which minimizes the composite cost is sequential fusion, where a fusion algorithm sequentially uses match scores until a desired confidence is reached, or until all the match scores are exhausted, before outputting the final combined score.

Iris recognition based on SIFT features

Biometric methods based on iris images are believed to allow very high accuracy, and there has been an explosion of interest in iris biometrics in recent years. In this paper, we use the Scale Invariant Feature Transformation (SIFT) for recognition using iris images. Contrarily to traditional iris recognition systems, the SIFT approach does not rely on the transformation of the iris pattern to polar coordinates or on highly accurate segmentation, allowing less constrained image acquisition conditions. We extract characteristic SIFT feature points in scale space and perform matching based on the texture information around the feature points using the SIFT operator. Experiments are done using the BioSec multimodal database, which includes 3,200 iris images from 200 individuals acquired in two different sessions. We contribute with the analysis of the influence of different SIFT parameters on the recognition performance. We also show the complementarity between the SIFT approach and a popular matching approach based on transformation to polar coordinates and Log-Gabor wavelets. The combination of the two approaches achieves significantly better performance than either of the individual schemes, with a performance improvement of 24% in the Equal Error Rate.

Direct Attacks Using Fake Images in Iris Verification

In this contribution, the vulnerabilities of iris-based recognition systems to direct attacks are studied. A database of fake iris images has been created from real iris of the BioSec baseline database. Iris images are printed using a commercial printer and then, presented at the iris sensor. We use for our experiments a publicly available iris recognition system, which some modifications to improve the iris segmentation step. Based on results achieved on different operational scenarios, we show that the system is vulnerable to direct attacks, pointing out the importance of having countermeasures against this type of fraudulent actions.

Dealing with sensor interoperability in multi-biometrics: The UPM experience at the BioSecure Multimodal Evaluation 2007

Multimodal biometric systems allow to overcome some of the problems presented in unimodal systems, such as non-universality, lack of distinctiveness of the unimodal trait, noise in the acquired data, etc. Integration at the matching score level is the most common approach used due to the ease in combining the scores generated by different unimodal systems. Unfortunately, scores usually lie in application-dependent domains. In this work, we use linear logistic regression fusion, in which fused scores tend to be calibrated log-likelihood-ratios and thus, independent of the application. We use for our experiments the development set of scores of the DS2 Evaluation (Access Control Scenario) of the BioSecure Multimodal Evaluation Campaign, whose objective is to compare the performance of fusion algorithms when query biometric signals are originated from heterogeneous biometric devices. We compare a fusion scheme that uses linear logistic regression with a set of simple fusion rules. It is observed that the proposed fusion scheme outperforms all the simple fusion rules, with the additional advantage of the application-independent nature of the resulting fused scores.

On the Vulnerability of Fingerprint Verification Systems to Fake Fingerprints Attacks

A new method to generate gummy fingers is presented. A medium-size fake fingerprint database is described and two different fingerprint verification systems are evaluated on it. Three different scenarios are considered in the experiments, namely: enrollment and test with real fingerprints, enrollment and test with fake fingerprints, and enrollment with real fingerprints and test with fake fingerprints. Results for optical and thermal sweeping sensors are given. Both systems are shown to be vulnerable to direct attacks

An enhanced Gabor filter-based segmentation algorithm for fingerprint recognition systems

An important step in fingerprint recognition is the segmentation of the region of interest. In this paper, we present an enhanced approach for fingerprint segmentation based on the response of eight oriented Gabor filters. The performance of the algorithm has been evaluated in terms of decision error trade-off curves of an overall verification system. Experimental results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed method.