Gongping Yang

On the Class Imbalance Problem

The class imbalance problem has been recognized in many practical domains and a hot topic of machine learning in recent years. In such a problem, almost all the examples are labeled as one class, while far fewer examples are labeled as the other class, usually the more important class. In this case, standard machine learning algorithms tend to be overwhelmed by the majority class and ignore the minority class since traditional classifiers seeking an accurate performance over a full range of instances. This paper reviewed academic activities special for the class imbalance problem firstly. Then investigated various remedies in four different levels according to learning phases. Following surveying evaluation metrics and some other related factors, this paper showed some future directions at last.

Hierarchical retinal blood vessel segmentation based on feature and ensemble learning

Segmentation of retinal blood vessels is of substantial clinical importance for diagnoses of many diseases, such as diabetic retinopathy, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases. In this paper, the supervised method is presented to tackle the problem of retinal blood vessel segmentation, which combines two superior classifiers: Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Random Forest (RF). In this method, CNN performs as a trainable hierarchical feature extractor and ensemble RFs work as a trainable classifier. By integrating the merits of feature learning and traditional classifier, the proposed method is able to automatically learn features from the raw images and predict the patterns. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two public retinal images databases (DRIVE and STARE), and comparisons with other major studies on the same database demonstrate the promising performance and effectiveness of the proposed method. A supervised method based on feature and ensemble learning is proposed.The whole pipeline of the proposed method is automatic and trainable.Convolutional Neural Network performs as a trainable hierarchical feature extractor.Ensemble Random Forests work as a trainable classifier.Compared with state-of-the-arts, the experimental results are promising.

Finger Vein Recognition Based on a Personalized Best Bit Map

Finger vein patterns have recently been recognized as an effective biometric identifier. In this paper, we propose a finger vein recognition method based on a personalized best bit map (PBBM). Our method is rooted in a local binary pattern based method and then inclined to use the best bits only for matching. We first present the concept of PBBM and the generating algorithm. Then we propose the finger vein recognition framework, which consists of preprocessing, feature extraction, and matching. Finally, we design extensive experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposal. Experimental results show that PBBM achieves not only better performance, but also high robustness and reliability. In addition, PBBM can be used as a general framework for binary pattern based recognition.

FINGER VEIN RECOGNITION BASED ON (2D)2PCA AND METRIC LEARNING

Finger vein recognition is a promising biometric recognition technology, which verifies identities via the vein patterns in the fingers. In this paper, (2D)2 PCA is applied to extract features of finger veins, based on which a new recognition method is proposed in conjunction with metric learning. It learns a KNN classifier for each individual, which is different from the traditional methods where a fixed threshold is employed for all individuals. Besides, the SMOTE technology is adopted to solve the class-imbalance problem. Our experiments show that the proposed method is effective by achieving a recognition rate of 99.17%.

Finger Vein Recognition Based on Local Directional Code

Finger vein patterns are considered as one of the most promising biometric authentication methods for its security and convenience. Most of the current available finger vein recognition methods utilize features from a segmented blood vessel network. As an improperly segmented network may degrade the recognition accuracy, binary pattern based methods are proposed, such as Local Binary Pattern (LBP), Local Derivative Pattern (LDP) and Local Line Binary Pattern (LLBP). However, the rich directional information hidden in the finger vein pattern has not been fully exploited by the existing local patterns. Inspired by the Webber Local Descriptor (WLD), this paper represents a new direction based local descriptor called Local Directional Code (LDC) and applies it to finger vein recognition. In LDC, the local gradient orientation information is coded as an octonary decimal number. Experimental results show that the proposed method using LDC achieves better performance than methods using LLBP.

Sliding window-based region of interest extraction for finger vein images.

Region of Interest (ROI) extraction is a crucial step in an automatic finger vein recognition system. The aim of ROI extraction is to decide which part of the image is suitable for finger vein feature extraction. This paper proposes a finger vein ROI extraction method which is robust to finger displacement and rotation. First, we determine the middle line of the finger, which will be used to correct the image skew. Then, a sliding window is used to detect the phalangeal joints and further to ascertain the height of ROI. Last, for the corrective image with certain height, we will obtain the ROI by using the internal tangents of finger edges as the left and right boundary. The experimental results show that the proposed method can extract ROI more accurately and effectively compared with other methods, and thus improve the performance of finger vein identification system. Besides, to acquire the high quality finger vein image during the capture process, we propose eight criteria for finger vein capture from different aspects and these criteria should be helpful to some extent for finger vein capture.

Singular value decomposition based minutiae matching method for finger vein recognition

Recently, finger vein recognition has received considerable attention in the biometric recognition field. Originating from fingerprint recognition, minutiae-based methods are recognized as an important branch, which attempts to discover minutia patterns from finger vein images for matching and recognition. However, the accuracy of these methods is generally unsatisfactory. One of the most challenging problems is that, the correspondences of two minutia sets are difficult to obtain resulting from the rotation, translation and deformation of the finger vein images. Another critical problem is that, the current available feature descriptors for minutia representation are weak and insufficient. In this paper, we propose SVDMM, a singular value decomposition (SVD)-based minutiae matching method for finger vein recognition, which involves three stages: (I) minutia pairing, (II) false removing and (III) score calculating. In particular, stage I discovers minutia pairs via SVD-based decomposition of the correlation-weighted proximity matrix. Stage II removes false pairs based on the local extensive binary pattern (LEBP) for increasing the reliability of the correspondences. Stage III determines the matching score of the input and template images by the ‘average’ matching degree of all their precise minutia pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our work not only performs better than the similar works in the literature, but also has great potential to achieve comparable performance to other categories of state-of-the-art methods.

Finger Vein Recognition with Personalized Feature Selection

Finger veins are a promising biometric pattern for personalized identification in terms of their advantages over existing biometrics. Based on the spatial pyramid representation and the combination of more effective information such as gray, texture and shape, this paper proposes a simple but powerful feature, called Pyramid Histograms of Gray, Texture and Orientation Gradients (PHGTOG). For a finger vein image, PHGTOG can reflect the global spatial layout and local details of gray, texture and shape. To further improve the recognition performance and reduce the computational complexity, we select a personalized subset of features from PHGTOG for each subject by using the sparse weight vector, which is trained by using LASSO and called PFS-PHGTOG. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate the promise of the PHGTOG and PFS-PHGTOG, experimental results on our databases show that PHGTOG outperforms the other existing features. Moreover, PFS-PHGTOG can further boost the performance in comparison with PHGTOG.

Finger vein image quality evaluation using support vector machines

Abstract. In an automatic finger-vein recognition system, finger-vein image quality is significant for segmentation, enhancement, and matching processes. In this paper, we propose a finger-vein image quality evaluation method using support vector machines (SVMs). We extract three features including the gradient, image contrast, and information capacity from the input image. An SVM model is built on the training images with annotated quality labels (i.e., high/low) and then applied to unseen images for quality evaluation. To resolve the class-imbalance problem in the training data, we perform oversampling for the minority class with random-synthetic minority oversampling technique. Cross-validation is also employed to verify the reliability and stability of the learned model. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of our method in evaluating the quality of finger-vein images, and by discarding low-quality images detected by our method, the overall finger-vein recognition performance is considerably improved.

K-means based fingerprint segmentation with sensor interoperability

A critical step in an automatic fingerprint recognition system is the segmentation of fingerprint images. Existing methods are usually designed to segment fingerprint images originated from a certain sensor. Thus their performances are significantly affected when dealing with fingerprints collected by different sensors. This work studies the sensor interoperability of fingerprint segmentation algorithms, which refers to the algorithms ability to adapt to the raw fingerprints obtained from different sensors. We empirically analyze the sensor interoperability problem, and effectively address the issue by proposing a -means based segmentation method called SKI. SKI clusters foreground and background blocks of a fingerprint image based on the -means algorithm, where a fingerprint block is represented by a 3-dimensional feature vector consisting of block-wise coherence, mean, and variance (abbreviated as CMV). SKI also employs morphological postprocessing to achieve favorable segmentation results. We perform SKI on each fingerprint to ensure sensor interoperability. The interoperability and robustness of our method are validated by experiments performed on a number of fingerprint databases which are obtained from various sensors.