Novel image fusion scheme based on dependency measure for robust multispectral palmprint recognition

Multispectral palmprint is considered as an effective biometric modality to accurately recognize a subject with high confidence. This paper presents a novel multispectral palmprint recognition system consisting of three functional blocks namely: (1) novel technique to extract Region of Interest (ROI) from the hand images acquired using a contact less sensor (2) novel image fusion scheme based on dependency measure (3) new scheme for feature extraction and classification. The proposed ROI extraction scheme is based on locating the valley regions between fingers irrespective of the hand pose. We then propose a novel image fusion scheme that combines information from different spectral bands using a Wavelet transform from various sub-bands. We then perform the statistical dependency analysis between these sub-bands to perform fusion either by selection or by weighted fusion. To effectively process the information from the fused image, we perform feature extraction using Log-Gabor transform whose feature dimension is reduced using Kernel Discriminant Analysis (KDA) before performing the classification by employing a Sparse Representation Classifier (SRC). Extensive experiments are carried out on a CASIA multispectral palmprint database that shows the strong superiority of our proposed fusion scheme when benchmarked with contemporary state-of-the-art image fusion schemes.     

Feature fusion of side face and gait for video-based human identification

Video-based human recognition at a distance remains a challenging problem for the fusion of multimodal biometrics. As compared to the approach based on match score level fusion, in this paper, we present a new approach that utilizes and integrates information from side face and gait at the feature level. The features of face and gait are obtained separately using principal component analysis (PCA) from enhanced side face image (ESFI) and gait energy image (GEI), respectively. Multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) is employed on the concatenated features of face and gait to obtain discriminating synthetic features. This process allows the generation of better features and reduces the curse of dimensionality. The proposed scheme is tested using two comparative data sets to show the effect of changing clothes and face changing over time. Moreover, the proposed feature level fusion is compared with the match score level fusion and another feature level fusion scheme. The experimental results demonstrate that the synthetic features, encoding both side face and gait information, carry more discriminating power than the individual biometrics features, and the proposed feature level fusion scheme outperforms the match score level and another feature level fusion scheme. The performance of different fusion schemes is also shown as cumulative match characteristic (CMC) curves. They further demonstrate the strength of the proposed fusion scheme.     

Face and palmprint pixel level fusion and Kernel DCV-RBF classifier for small sample biometric recognition

Recently, multi-modal biometric fusion techniques have attracted increasing atove the recognition performance in some difficult biometric problems. The small sample biometric recognition problem is such a research difficulty in real-world applications. So far, most research work on fusion techniques has been done at the highest fusion level, i.e. the decision level. In this paper, we propose a novel fusion approach at the lowest level, i.e. the image pixel level. We first combine two kinds of biometrics: the face feature, which is a representative of contactless biometric, and the palmprint feature, which is a typical contacting biometric. We perform the Gabor transform on face and palmprint images and combine them at the pixel level. The correlation analysis shows that there is very small correlation between their normalized Gabor-transformed images. This paper also presents a novel classifier, KDCV-RBF, to classify the fused biometric images. It extracts the image discriminative features using a Kernel discriminative common vectors (KDCV) approach and classifies the features by using the radial base function (RBF) network. As the test data, we take two largest public face databases (AR and FERET) and a large palmprint database. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed biometric fusion recognition approach is a rather effective solution for the small sample recognition problem.     

基于分类性能的掌纹特征有机融合

为了克服利用单一特征进行掌纹识别的局限性,提出一种基于分类性能的掌纹多特征有机融合方法。该特征融合方法通过三步来实现:特征选择、加权处理和降维处理。在分析单一特征分量聚类性能的基础上,通过构造判别准则并设定相应阈值对特征进行取舍;通过构造类内距离与类间距离之比这一函数计算得到每个特征分量的权值,然后进行加权处理;最后利用主分量分析法对特征进行降维处理。以改进的LBP算法和离散小波变换提取掌纹的两种特征,将提取的特征进行融合实验,结果表明了该方法的有效性。     

Fusion of palm-phalanges print with palmprint and dorsal hand vein

To ensure the high performance of a biometric system, various unimodal systems are combined to evade their constraints to form a multimodal biometric system. Here, a multimodal personal authentication system using palmprint, dorsal hand vein pattern and a novel biometric modality “palm-phalanges print” is presented. Firstly, we have collected a new anterior hand database of 50 individuals with 500 images at the institute referred to as NSIT Palmprint Database 1.0 by using NSIT palmprint device. Then from these anterior hand images, database for palmprint and palm-phalanges is created. In this biometric system, the individuals do not have to undergo the distress of using two different sensors since the palmprint and palm-phalanges print features can be captured from the same image, using NSIT palmprint device, at the same time. For dorsal hand vein, Bosphorus Hand Vein Database is used because of the stability and uniqueness of hand vein patterns. We propose fusion of three different biometric modalities which includes palmprint (PP), palm-phalanges print (PPP) and dorsal hand vein (DHV) and perform score level fusion of PP-PPP, PP-DHV, PPP-DHV and PP-PPP-DHV strategies. Lastly, we use K-nearest neighbor, support vector machine and random forest to validate the matching stage. The results proved the validity of our proposed modality and show that multimodal fusion has an edge over unimodal fusion.     

Dual-source discrimination power analysis for multi-instance contactless palmprint recognition

Due to the benefits of palmprint recognition and the advantages of biometric fusion systems, it is necessary to study multi-source palmprint fusion systems. Unfortunately, the research on multi-instance palmprint feature fusion is absent until now. In this paper, we extract the features of left and right palmprints with two-dimensional discrete cosine transform (2DDCT) to constitute a dual-source space. Normalization is utilized in dual-source space to avoid the disturbance caused by the coefficients with large absolute values. Thus complicated pre-masking is needless and arbitrary removing of discriminative coefficients is avoided. Since more discriminative coefficients can be preserved and retrieved with discrimination power analysis (DPA) from dual-source space, the accuracy performance is improved. The experiments performed on contactless palmprint database confirm that dual-source DPA, which is designed for multi-instance palmprint feature fusion recognition, outperforms single-source DPA.     

A comparative study of combining multiple enrolled samples for fingerprint verification

In fingerprint verification systems, there are usually multiple (from two to four) enrolled impressions for a same finger. The performance of the systems can be improved by combining these impressions through feature fusion or decision fusion strategy. In this paper, different schemes to combine multiple enrolled impressions are comparatively studied. Experimental results show that a larger improvement can be obtained by using decision fusion scheme than feature fusion. In all decision fusion rules, sum rule outperforms voting rule a little whether using similarity or Neyman-Pearson rule. Based on the observation that the performance of these two strategies can complement each other, we also propose a novel fusion scheme to further combine feature fusion and decision fusion, which can produce an even better result.     

Particle swarm optimization based fusion of near infrared and visible images for improved face verification

This paper presents two novel image fusion schemes for combining visible and near infrared face images (NIR), aiming at improving the verification performance. Sub-band decomposition is first performed on the visible and NIR images separately. In both cases, we further employ particle swarm optimization (PSO) to find an optimal strategy for performing fusion of the visible and NIR sub-band coefficients. In the first scheme, PSO is used to calculate the optimum weights of a weighted linear combination of the coefficients. In the second scheme, PSO is used to select an optimal subset of features from visible and near infrared face images. To evaluate and compare the efficacy of the proposed schemes, we have performed extensive verification experiments on the IRVI database. This database was acquired in our laboratory using a new sensor that is capable of acquiring visible and near infrared face images simultaneously thereby avoiding the need for image calibration. The experiments show the strong superiority of our first scheme compared to NIR and score fusion performance, which already showed a good stability to illumination variations.     

基于掌纹、人脸在特征层融合的身份识别算法

首先利用小波变换增强掌纹、人脸图像;然后利用一种新的子空间分析方法——对角离散余弦变换和二维主元判别分析(Diagonal,Discrete Cosine Transform and Two-Dimensional Principle Component Analysis,Dia-DCT+2DPCA)相结合的算法提出了一种掌纹、人脸特征融合的识别方法;最后运用最小距离分类器进行识别。实验结果表明,该文提出的掌纹、人脸特征融合方法实现了特征层融合,有效地提高了身份识别的正确识别率。     

多特征局部与全局融合的人脸识别方法

提出一种在分数层上对全局和局部特征进行融合的人脸识别方法。全局特征由不同局部描述算子对整幅人脸图像进行运算产生,局部特征按空间位置的不同划分由直接抽取全局特征的子集构成。根据实际应用中对人脸识别系统速度和精度的不同要求,给出2种融合策略组合全局和局部特征。在FRGC v2.0大规模人脸库上的实验结果表明,该方法在增加少量运算的条件下能使系统性能明显提升。     

PalmPhasor算法性能的理论分析

模板的安全性和隐私性是掌纹系统实际应用的关键问题,然而生物特征保护的多项指标通常相互冲突并且难以同时满足.作为解决上述冲突的一种可撤销掌纹编码算法,PalmPhasor实现了高效、安全的掌纹认证.建立了系统分析PalmPhasor性能的完整框架.为了便于具体分析,将情景分为4种情况,并且提供了支持相应分析的预备知识,包括辅助定理以及Gabor滤波掌纹图像实部和虚部分布特性.在统计学基础上建立的理论分析和实验结果均表明:即使在用户口令被盗的情况下,多方向分数级融合增强的PalmPhasor算法也可以同时有效地满足可撤销生物特征的4项指标.     

Group sparse representation based classification for multi-feature multimodal biometrics

Multimodal biometrics technology consolidates information obtained from multiple sources at sensor level, feature level, match score level, and decision level. It is used to increase robustness and provide broader population coverage for inclusion. Due to the inherent challenges involved with feature-level fusion, combining multiple evidences is attempted at score, rank, or decision level where only a minimal amount of information is preserved. In this paper, we propose the Group Sparse Representation based Classifier (GSRC) which removes the requirement for a separate feature-level fusion mechanism and integrates multi-feature representation seamlessly into classification. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated on two multimodal biometric datasets. Experimental results indicate that the proposed classifier succeeds in efficiently utilizing a multi-feature representation of input data to perform accurate biometric recognition.     

融合全局和局部方向特征的掌纹识别方法

摘 要：掌纹识别是受到较多关注的生物特征识别技术之一。在各类掌纹识别的方法中, 基于方向特征的方法取得了很好的效果。为了进一步提升识别精度,提出一种融合全局和局部 方向特征的掌纹识别算法,主要融合了基于方向编码的方法、基于方向特征局部描述子的方法 和结合方向特征和相关滤波器的方法。其中前 2 种方法属于空间域方法,可很好地提取掌纹的 局部方向特征;而第 3 种方法属于频域方法,能有效地提取全局方向特征。在匹配值层对该 3 种方法的识别结果进行融合。本文算法在 2 个掌纹数据库上进行了验证,实验结果表明,本文 方法的识别性能明显优于其他几种掌纹识别方法。     

A face and palmprint recognition approach based on discriminant DCT feature extraction

In the field of image processing and recognition, discrete cosine transform (DCT) and linear discrimination are two widely used techniques. Based on them, we present a new face and palmprint recognition approach in this paper. It first uses a two-dimensional separability judgment to select the DCT frequency bands with favorable linear separability. Then from the selected bands, it extracts the linear discriminative features by an improved Fisherface method and performs the classification by the nearest neighbor classifier. We detailedly analyze theoretical advantages of our approach in feature extraction. The experiments on face databases and palmprint database demonstrate that compared to the state-of-the-art linear discrimination methods, our approach obtains better classification performance. It can significantly improve the recognition rates for face and palmprint data and effectively reduce the dimension of feature space.     

Personal authentication using multiple palmprint representation

Although several palmprint representations have been proposed for personal authentication, there is little agreement on which palmprint representation can provide best representation for reliable authentication. In this paper, we characterize user's identity through the simultaneous use of three major palmprint representations and achieve better performance than either one individually. This paper also investigates comparative performance between Gabor, line and appearance based palmprint representations and using their score and decision level fusion. The combination of various representations may not always lead to higher performance as the features from the same image may be correlated. Therefore we also propose product of sum rule which achieves better performance than any other fixed combination rules. Our experimental results on the database of 100 users achieve 34.56% improvement in performance (equal error rate) as compared to the case when features from single palmprint representation are employed. The proposed usage of multiple palmprint representations, especially on the peg-free and non-contact imaging setup, achieves promising results and demonstrates its usefulness.     

人耳人脸特征融合在身份鉴别中的研究

针对单一人耳识别对姿态变化鲁棒性较差的问题,鉴于人脸在图像性质和生理位置上与人耳具有相似性和互补性,使用了多模态特征融合的方法提高姿态变化下的识别率.与传统的独立成分分析首先获得独立的基向量(ICAl)不同,提出了利用ICA直接获得独立的鉴剐特征的方法(ICA2).在USTB图像库上分别将两种ICA特征进行单模态和多模态的融合.实验表明,两种特征的融合提高了单一模态的识别率,并且多模态识别优于单一的人耳或人脸识别.     

Improved discriminant locality preserving projections for face and palmprint recognition

We propose in this paper two improved manifold learning methods called diagonal discriminant locality preserving projections (Dia-DLPP) and weighted two-dimensional discriminant locality preserving projections (W2D-DLPP) for face and palmprint recognition. Motivated by the fact that diagonal images outperform the original images for conventional two-dimensional (2D) subspace learning methods such as 2D principal component analysis (2DPCA) and 2D linear discriminant analysis (2DLDA), we first propose applying diagonal images to a recently proposed 2D discriminant locality preserving projections (2D-DLPP) algorithm, and formulate the Dia-DLPP method for feature extraction of face and palmprint images. Moreover, we show that transforming an image to a diagonal image is equivalent to assigning an appropriate weight to each pixel of the original image to emphasize its different importance for recognition, which provides the rationale and superiority of using diagonal images for 2D subspace learning. Inspired by this finding, we further propose a new discriminant weighted method to explicitly calculate the discriminative score of each pixel within a face and palmprint sample to duly emphasize its different importance, and incorporate it into 2D-DLPP to formulate the W2D-DLPP method to improve the recognition performance of 2D-DLPP and Dia-DLPP. Experimental results on the widely used FERET face and PolyU palmprint databases demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed methods.     

Representation plurality and fusion for 3-D face recognition

In this paper, we present an extensive study of 3-D face recognition algorithms and examine the benefits of various score-, rank-, and decision-level fusion rules. We investigate face recognizers from two perspectives: the data representation techniques used and the feature extraction algorithms that match best each representation type. We also consider novel applications of various feature extraction techniques such as discrete Fourier transform, discrete cosine transform, nonnegative matrix factorization, and principal curvature directions to the shape modality. We discuss and compare various classifier combination methods such as fixed rules voting- and rank-based fusion schemes. We also present a dynamic confidence estimation algorithm to boost fusion performance. In identification experiments performed on FRGC v1.0 and FRGC v2.0 face databases, we tried to find the answers to the following questions: 1) the relative importance of the face representation technique vis-à-vis the types of features extracted; 2) the impact of the gallery size; 3) the conditions, under which subspace methods are preferable, and the compression factor; 4) the most advantageous fusion level and fusion methods; 5) the role confidence votes in improving fusion and the style of selecting experts in the fusion; and 6) the consistency of the conclusions across different databases.     

Hand-based single sample biometrics recognition

Currently, single sample biometrics recognition (SSBR) has emerged as one of the major research contents. It may lead to bad recognition result. To solve this problem, we present a novel approach by fusing two kinds of hand-based biometrics, i.e., palmprint and middle finger. We obtain their discriminant features by combining statistical information and structural information of each modal which are extracted using locality preserving projection (LPP) based on wavelet transform (WT). In order to reduce the influence of affine transform, we utilize mean filtering to enhance the robustness of structural information to improve the discriminant ability of palmprint high-frequency sub-bands. The two types of features are then fused at score level for the final hand-based SSBR. The experiments on the hand image database that contains 1,000 samples from 100 individuals show that the proposed feature extraction and fusion methods lead to promising performance.