Gabriel Emile Hine

An enhanced ultrasound technique for 3D palmprint recognition

In the present work, and enhanced ultrasound technique for extracting 3D palmprint for biometric recognition purposes is presented. The ULtrasound Advanced Open Platform (ULA-OP) is employed as ultrasound imaging system. A commercial high frequency (12 MHz) linear array is moved in the elevation direction by an automated scanning system based on numeric controlled pantograph, which guarantees stable and repeatable measurements. The 3D data are then acquired and elaborated in MATLAB environment to provide several renderings of the 3D palmprint. The experimental results are compared with those acquired with conventional techniques.

On the vulnerability of an EEG-based biometric system to hill-climbing attacks algorithms' comparison and possible countermeasures

In this paper we analyze the vulnerability to hill-climbing attacks of a biometric recognition system based on electroencephalography (EEG). It is assumed that an attacker can access the scores produced by the employed matcher, and use them to control the generation of synthetic EEG templates until achieving a successful authentication. To this aim, different general approaches relying on function optimization are evaluated and compared in terms of authentication success rate and average number of required attempts. The possibility of increasing the system robustness against this kind of attacks, without significantly affecting its recognition performance, is also investigated.

Hill-climbing attack: Parametric optimization and possible countermeasures. An application to on-line signature recognition

Although biometric recognition systems provide many advantages over traditional recognition methods, they can be vulnerable to specific attacks which may considerably decrease their security. In this paper we focus on the hill-climbing attack which is peculiar of biometric systems. Specifically, we evaluate the effectiveness of general approaches relying on parametric functions optimization for performing this kind of attack, and propose possible countermeasures which can be used for increasing the system robustness without significantly affecting its recognition performance. An application to on-line signature biometrics is taken into account to test both the proposed attacks and some possible countermeasures.

Wide 3D ultrasound palmprint for biometric recognition

An ultrasound technique for extracting 3D palmprints has been recently proposed. A drawback of that method relies in the small volume acquired, which is limited by the aperture of the array.

Resting-State Eeg: A Study on Its Non-Stationarity for Biometric Applications

In the last years, several papers on EEG-based biometric recognition systems have been published. Specifically, most of the proposed contributions focus on brain signals recorded in resting state conditions, with either closed or open eyes. A common assumption is that the acquired signals are quasi-stationarity. In this paper, we investigate such property in terms of discriminative capability, and we analyze whether or not it holds throughout the entire duration of data collected over long periods. An extensive set of experimental tests, conducted over a database comprising signals collected from 50 subjects in three distinct acquisition sessions, shows that the most distinctive information of the brain signals is temporally located at the beginning of each recording.

A Zero-Leakage Fuzzy Embedder From the Theoretical Formulation to Real Data

In this paper, we present a novel biometric cryptosystem obtaining perfect security, that is not leaking any information about the employed secret key from the knowledge of the stored helper data. While similar purposes have already been sought in the literature, the approaches proposed so far have been evaluated in terms of recognition performance under the unrealistic assumption of ideal statistical distributions for the considered biometric data. Conversely, in this paper, we investigate the applicability of the proposed framework to practical scenarios while managing a trade-off between privacy and recognition performance. This goal has been achieved by introducing a class of transformation functions enforcing zero-leakage secrecy, by designing an adaptive strategy for embedding the secret key bits into the selected features, and by developing a system parameters optimization strategy with respect to security, recognition performance, and privacy. Experimental tests conducted on real fingerprint data prove the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

2D and 3D Palmprint Extraction by an Automated Ultrasound System

In this work, some possible procedures to extract both 2D and 3D palmprints from the same experimental 3D ultrasound image of the human palm are presented. The ultrasound system used to achieve the 3D images is composed of a CNC commercial pantograph, which moves a high frequency (12 MHz) ultrasound probe along its elevation direction to cover the desired area of the human palm. The ULtrasound Advanced Open Platform (ULA-OP) is employed as ultrasound imaging system.