In this thesis, we presented a detailed study of the face verification problem on the mobile device, covering every component of the system. The study includes face detection, registration, normalization, and verification. Furthermore, the information fusion problem is studied to verify face sequences, and to fuse different modalities. Although the work is application-specific, the thesis is not limited to the application, but more extensive. In every step, we have justified the methods we choose both from the theoretical and the practical point of view. In the review part of each chapter, we discussed principles and methodologies on a higher level, for a better understanding of the problems in general. In our solutions, on the other hand, we have taken care of the application requirements, and put much emphasis on the efficiency and simplicity of the methods. The system has dealt ...

The number of cameras increases rapidly in squares, shopping centers, railway stations and airport halls. There are hundreds of cameras in the city center of Amsterdam. This is still modest compared to the tens of thousands of cameras in London, where citizens are expected to be filmed by more than three hundred cameras of over thirty separate Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) systems in a single day [84]. These CCTV systems include both publicly owned systems (railway stations, squares, airports) and privately owned systems (shops, banks, hotels). The main purpose of all these cameras is to detect, prevent and monitor crime and anti-social behaviour. Other goals of camera surveillance can be detection of unauthorized access, improvement of service, fire safety, etc. Since the terrorist attack on 9/11, detection and prevention of terrorist activities especially at high profiled locations such as airports, ...

The number of biometric applications has increased a lot in the last few years. In this context, the automatic person recognition by some physical traits like fingerprints, face, voice or iris, plays an important role. Users demand this type of applications every time more and the technology seems already mature. People look for security, low cost and accuracy but, at the same time, there are many other factors in connection with biometric applications that are growing in importance. Intrusiveness is undoubtedly a burning factor to decide about the biometrics we will used for our application. At this point, one can realize about the suitability of speaker recognition because voice is the natural way of communicating, can be remotely used and provides a low cost. Automatic speaker recognition is commonly used in telephonic applications although it can also be used in ...

Interest in biometric based identification and verification systems has increased considerably over the last decade. As an example, the shortcomings of security systems based on passwords can be addressed through the supplemental use of biometric systems based on speech signals, face images or fingerprints. Biometric recognition can also be applied to other areas, such as passport control (immigration checkpoints), forensic work (to determine whether a biometric sample belongs to a suspect) and law enforcement applications (e.g. surveillance). While biometric systems based on face images and/or speech signals can be useful, their performance can degrade in the presence of challenging conditions. In face based systems this can be in the form of a change in the illumination direction and/or face pose variations. Multi-modal systems use more than one biometric at the same time. This is done for two main reasons -- ...

Biometric recognition for a long time has been used in confined spaces, usually indoor, where security-critical operations required high accuracy recognition systems, e.g. in police stations, banks, companies, airports. Field activities, on the contrary, required more portability and flexibility leading to the development of devices for less constrained biometric traits acquisition and consequently of robust algorithms for biometric recognition in less constrained conditions. However, the application of "portable" biometric recognition, was still limited in specific fields e.g. for immigration control, and still required dedicated devices. A further step would be to spread the use of biometric recognition on personal devices, as personal computers, tablets and smartphones. Some attempts in this direction were made embedding fingerprint scanners in laptops or smartphones. So far biometric recognition on personal devices has been employed just for a limited set of tasks, as to unlock ...

This thesis has two main parts. The first part deals with security and privacy analysis of biometric hashing. The second part introduces a method for fixed-length feature vector extraction and hash generation from fingerprint minutiae. The upsurge of interest in biometric systems has led to development of biometric template protection methods in order to overcome security and privacy problems. Biometric hashing produces a secure binary template by combining a personal secret key and the biometric of a person, which leads to a two factor authentication method. This dissertation analyzes biometric hashing both from a theoretical point of view and in regards to its practical application. For theoretical evaluation of biohashes, a systematic approach which uses estimated entropy based on degree of freedom of a binomial distribution is outlined. In addition, novel practical security and privacy attacks against face image hashing ...

This Thesis is focused on the quality assessment of biometric signals and its application to multimodal biometric systems. Since the establishment of biometrics as an specific research area in late 90s, the biometric community has focused its efforts in the development of accurate recognition algorithms and nowadays, biometric recognition is a mature technology that is used in many applications. However, we can notice recent studies that demonstrate how performance of biometric systems is heavily affected by the quality of biometric signals. Quality measurement has emerged in the biometric community as an important concern after the poor performance observed in biometric systems on certain pathological samples. We first summarize the state-of-the-art in the biometric quality problem. We present the factors influencing biometric quality, which mainly have to do with four issues: the individual itself, the sensor used in the acquisition, the ...

The increasing need for personal authentication in many daily applications has made biometrics a fundamental research area. In particular, handwritten signatures have long been considered one of the most valuable biometric traits. Signatures are the most popular method for identity verification all over the world, and people are familiar with the use of signatures for identity verification purposes in their everyday life. In fact, signatures are widely used in several daily transactions, being recognized as a legal means of verifying an individual’s identity by financial and administrative institutions. In addition, signature verification has the advantage of being a non-invasive biometric technique. Two categories of signature verification systems can be distinguished taking into account the acquisition device, namely, offline systems, where only the static image of the signature is available, and online systems, where dynamic information acquired during the signing process, ...

Face recognition is one of the most challenging problems of computer vision and pattern recognition. The difficulty in face recognition arises mainly from facial appearance variations caused by factors, such as expression, illumination, partial face occlusion, and time gap between training and testing data capture. Moreover, the performance of face recognition algorithms heavily depends on prior facial feature localization step. That is, face images need to be aligned very well before they are fed into a face recognition algorithm, which requires precise facial feature localization. This thesis addresses on solving these two main problems -facial appearance variations due to changes in expression, illumination, occlusion, time gap, and imprecise face alignment due to mislocalized facial features- in order to accomplish its goal of building a generic face recognition algorithm that can function reliably under real-world conditions. The proposed face recognition algorithm ...

Biometric systems consist in the combination of devices, algorithms, and procedures used to recognize the individuals based on the characteristics, physical or behavioral, of their persons. These characteristics are called biometric traits. Nowadays, biometric technologies are becoming more and more widespread, and many people use biometric systems daily. However, in some cases the procedures used for the collection of the biometric traits need the cooperation of the user, controlled environments, illuminations perceived as unpleasant, too strong, or harmful, or the contact of the body with a sensor. For these reasons, techniques for the contactless and less-constrained biometric recognition are being researched, in order to increase the usability and social acceptance of biometric systems, and increase the fields of application of biometric technologies. In this context, the palmprint is a biometric trait whose acquisition is generally well accepted by the users. ...

As biometrics gains popularity and proliferates into the daily life, there is an increased concern over the loss of privacy and potential misuse of biometric data held in central repositories. The major concerns are about i) the use of biometrics to track people, ii) non-revocability of biometrics (eg. if a fingerprint is compromised it can not be canceled or reissued), and iii) disclosure of sensitive information such as race, gender and health problems which may be revealed by biometric traits. The straightforward suggestion of keeping the biometric data in a user owned token (eg. smart cards) does not completely solve the problem, since malicious users can claim that their token is broken to avoid biometric verification altogether. Put together, these concerns brought the need for privacy preserving biometric authentication methods in the recent years. In this dissertation, we survey existing ...

In this doctoral dissertation, we principally explore the use of the temporal information available in video sequences for person and gender recognition; in particular, we focus on the analysis of head and facial motion, and their potential application as biometric identifiers. We also investigate how to exploit as much video information as possible for the automatic recognition; more precisely, we examine the possibility of integrating the head and mouth motion information with facial appearance into a multimodal biometric system, and we study the extraction of novel spatio-temporal facial features for recognition. We initially present a person recognition system that exploits the unconstrained head motion information, extracted by tracking a few facial landmarks in the image plane. In particular, we detail how each video sequence is firstly pre-processed by semiautomatically detecting the face, and then automatically tracking the facial landmarks over ...

Recent advances in computer technology and speech and language processing have made possible that some new ways of person-machine communication and computer assistance to human activities start to appear feasible. Concretely, the interest on the development of new challenging applications in indoor environments equipped with multiple multimodal sensors, also known as smart-rooms, has considerably grown. In general, it is well-known that the quality of speech signals captured by microphones that can be located several meters away from the speakers is severely distorted by acoustic noise and room reverberation. In the context of the development of hands-free speech applications in smart-room environments, the use of obtrusive sensors like close-talking microphones is usually not allowed, and consequently, speech technologies must operate on the basis of distant-talking recordings. In such conditions, speech technologies that usually perform reasonably well in free of noise and ...

Biometric recognition is the automated recognition of individuals based on their behavioral or biological characteristics. Beside forensic applications, this technology aims at replacing the outdated and attack prone, physical and knowledge-based, proofs of identity. Choosing one biometric characteristic is a tradeoff between universality, acceptability, and permanence, among other factors. Moreover, the accuracy cap of the chosen characteristic may limit the scalability and usability for some applications. The use of multiple biometric sources within a unified frame, i.e. multi-biometrics, aspires to tackle the limitations of single source biometrics and thus enables a wider implementation of the technology. This work aims at presenting application-driven advances in multi-biometrics by addressing different elements of the multi-biometric system work-flow. At first, practical oriented pre-fusion issues regarding missing data imputation and score normalization are discussed. This includes presenting a novel performance anchored score normalization technique that ...

Absolute security does not exist: given funding, willpower and the proper technology, every security system can be compromised. However, the objective of the security community should be to develop such applications that the funding, the will, and the resources needed by the attacker to crack the system prevent him from attempting to do so. This Thesis is focused on the vulnerability assessment of biometric systems. Although being relatively young compared to other mature and long-used security technologies, biometrics have emerged in the last decade as a pushing alternative for applications where automatic recognition of people is needed. Certainly, biometrics are very attractive and useful for the final user: forget about PINs and passwords, you are your own key. However, we cannot forget that as any technology aimed to provide a security service, biometric systems are exposed to external attacks which ...