First, an overview of the state of the art in fingerprint recognition is presented, including current issues and challenges. Fingerprint databases and evaluation campaigns, are also summarized. This is followed by the description of the BioSecure Benchmarking Framework for Fingerprints, using the NIST Fingerpint Image Software (NFIS2), the publicly available MCYT-100 database, and two evaluation protocols. Two research systems are compared within the proposed framework. The evaluated systems follow different approaches for fingerprint processing and are discussed in detail. Fusion experiments involving different combinations of the presented systems are also given. The NFIS2 software is also used to obtain the fingerprint scores for the multimodal experiments conducted within the BioSecure Multimodal Evaluation Campaign(BMEC’2007) reported in Chap.11.

A technique evaluating liveness in face image sequences is presented. To ensure the actual presence of a live face in contrast to a photograph (playback attack), is a significant problem in face authentication to the extent that anti-spoofing measures are highly desirable. The purpose of the proposed system is to assist in a biometric authentication framework, by adding liveness awareness in a non-intrusive manner. Analyzing the trajectories of certain parts of a live face reveals valuable information to discriminate it against a spoofed one. The proposed system uses a lightweight novel optical flow, which is especially applicable in face motion estimation based on the structure tensor and inputs of a few frames. For reliable face part detection, the system utilizes a model-based local Gabor decomposition and SVM experts, where selected points from a retinotopic grid are used to form regional face models. Also the estimated optical flow is exploited to detect a face part. The whole procedure, starting with three images as input and finishing in a liveness score, is executed in near real-time without special purpose hardware. Experimental results on the proposed system are presented on both a public database and spoofing attack simulations.

Signal-quality awareness has been found to increase recognition rates and to support decisions in multisensor environments significantly. Nevertheless, automatic quality assessment is still an open issue. Here, we study the orientation tensor of fingerprint images to quantify signal impairments, such as noise, lack of structure, blur, with the help of symmetry descriptors. A strongly reduced reference is especially favorable in biometrics, but less information is not sufficient for the approach. This is also supported by numerous experiments involving a simpler quality estimator, a trained method (NFIQ), as well as the human perception of fingerprint quality on several public databases. Furthermore, quality measurements are extensively reused to adapt fusion parameters in a monomodal multialgorithm fingerprint recognition environment. In this study, several trained and nontrained score-level fusion schemes are investigated. A Bayes-based strategy for incorporating experts' past performances and current quality conditions, a novel cascaded scheme for computational efficiency, besides simple fusion rules, is presented. The quantitative results favor quality awareness under all aspects, boosting recognition rates and fusing differently skilled experts efficiently as well as effectively (by training).

Accurate fingerprint recognition presupposes robust feature extraction which is often hampered by noisy input data. We suggest common techniques for both enhancement and minutiae extraction, employing symmetry features. For enhancement, a Laplacian-like image pyramid is used to decompose the original fingerprint into sub-bands corresponding to different spatial scales. In a further step, contextual smoothing is performed on these pyramid levels, where the corresponding filtering directions stem from the frequency-adapted structure tensor (linear symmetry features). For minutiae extraction, parabolic symmetry is added to the local fingerprint model which allows to accurately detect the position and direction of a minutia simultaneously. Our experiments support the view that using the suggested parabolic symmetry features, the extraction of which does not require explicit thinning or other morphological operations, constitute a robust alternative to conventional minutiae extraction. All necessary image processing is done in the spatial domain using 1-D filters only, avoiding block artifacts that reduce the biometric information. We present comparisons to other studies on enhancement in matching tasks employing the open source matcher from NIST, FIS2. Furthermore, we compare the proposed minutiae extraction method with the corresponding method from the NIST package, mindtct. A top five commercial matcher from FVC2006 is used in enhancement quantification as well. The matching error is lowered significantly when plugging in the suggested methods. The FVC2004 fingerprint database, notable for its exceptionally low-quality fingerprints, is used for all experiments.

Resisting spoofing attempts via photographs and video playbacks is a vital issue for the success of face biometrics. Yet, the “liveness ” topic has only been partially studied in the past. In this paper we are suggesting a holistic liveness detection paradigm that collaborates with standard techniques in 2D face biometrics. The experiments show that many attacks are avertible via a combination of antispoofing measures. We have investigated the topic using real-time techniques and applied them to real-life spoofing scenarios in an indoor, yet uncontrolled environment.

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.

We report on experiments for the fingerprint modality conducted during the First BioSecure Residential Workshop. Two reference systems for fingerprint verification have been tested together with two additional non-reference systems. These systems follow different approaches of fingerprint processing and are discussed in detail. Fusion experiments involving different combinations of the available systems are presented. The experimental results show that the best recognition strategy involves both minutiae-based and correlation-based measurements. Regarding the fusion experiments, the best relative improvement is obtained when fusing systems that are based on heterogeneous strategies for feature extraction and/or matching. The best combinations of two/three/four systems always include the best individual systems whereas the best verification performance is obtained when combining all the available systems.

Reliable feature extraction is crucial for accurate biometric recognition. Unfortunately feature extraction is hampered by noisy input data, especially so in case of fingerprints. We propose a method to enhance the quality of a given fingerprint with the purpose to improve the recognition performance. A Laplacian like image-scale pyramid is used for this purpose to decompose the original fingerprint into 3 smaller images corresponding to different frequency bands. In a further step, contextual filtering is performed using these pyramid levels and 1D Gaussians, where the corresponding filtering directions are derived from the frequency-adapted structure tensor. All image processing is done in the spatial domain, avoiding block artifacts while conserving the biometric signal well. We report on comparative results and present quantitative improvements, by applying the standardized NIST FIS2 fingerprint matcher to the FVC2004 fingerprint database along with our as well as two other enhancements. The study confirms that the suggested enhancement robustifies feature detection, e.g. minutiae, which in turn improves the recognition (20% relative improvement in equal error rate on DB3 of FVC2004).

A robust face detection technique along with mouth localization, processing every frame in real time (video rate), is presented. Moreover, it is exploited for motion analysis onsite to verify "liveness" as well as to achieve lip reading of digits. A methodological novelty is the suggested quantized angle features ("quangles") being designed for illumination invariance without the need for preprocessing (e.g., histogram equalization). This is achieved by using both the gradient direction and the double angle direction (the structure tensor angle), and by ignoring the magnitude of the gradient. Boosting techniques are applied in a quantized feature space. A major benefit is reduced processing time (i.e., that the training of effective cascaded classifiers is feasible in very short time, less than 1 h for data sets of order 104). Scale invariance is implemented through the use of an image scale pyramid. We propose "liveness" verification barriers as applications for which a significant amount of computation is avoided when estimating motion. Novel strategies to avert advanced spoofing attempts (e.g., replayed videos which include person utterances) are demonstrated. We present favorable results on face detection for the YALE face test set and competitive results for the CMU-MIT frontal face test set as well as on "liveness" verification barriers.

A method using local features to assess the quality of an image, with demonstration in biometrics, is proposed. Recently, image quality awareness has been found to increase recognition rates and to support decisions in multimodal authentication systems significantly. Nevertheless, automatic quality assessment is still an open issue, especially with regard to general tasks. Indicators of perceptual quality like noise, lack of structure, blur, etc. can be retrieved from the orientation tensor of an image, but there are few studies reporting on this. Here we study the orientation tensor with a set of symmetry descriptors, which can be varied according to the application. Allowed classes of local shapes are generically provided by the user but no training or explicit reference information is required. Experimental results are given for fingerprint. Furthermore, we indicate the applicability of the proposed method to face images.