Finger vein recognition is gaining popularity in the field of biometrics, yet the inter-operability of finger vein patterns has received limited attention. This study aims to fill this gap by introducing a cross-device finger vein dataset and evaluating the performance of finger vein recognition across devices using a classical method, a convolutional neural network, and our proposed patch-based convolutional auto-encoder (CAE). The findings emphasise the importance of standardisation of finger vein recognition, similar to that of fingerprints or irises, crucial for achieving inter-operability. Despite the inherent challenges of cross-device recognition, the proposed CAE architecture in this study demonstrates promising results in finger vein recognition, particularly in the context of cross-device comparisons.

Tuğçe Arıcan

Raymond Veldhuis

Luuk Spreeuwers

Loïc Bergeron

Christoph Busch

Ehsaneddin Jalilian

Christof Kauba

Simon Kirchgasser

Sébastien Marcel

Bernhard Prommegger

Kiran Raja

Raghavendra Ramachandra

Andreas Uhl

A Comparative Study of Cross-Device Finger Vein Recognition Using Classical and Deep Learning Approaches

Text-independent speaker verification (TI-SV) is a crucial task in speaker recognition, as it involves verifying an individual’s claimed identity from speech of arbitrary content without any human intervention. The target for TI-SV is to design a discriminative network to learn deep speaker embedding for speaker idiosyncrasy. In this paper, we propose a deep speaker embedding learning approach of a hybrid deep neural network (DNN) for TI-SV in FM broadcasting. Not only acoustic features are utilized, but also phoneme features are introduced as prior knowledge to collectively learn deep speaker embedding. The hybrid DNN consists of a convolutional neural network architecture for generating acoustic features and a multilayer perceptron architecture for extracting phoneme features sequentially, which represent significant pronunciation attributes. The extracted acoustic and phoneme features are concatenated to form deep embedding descriptors for speaker identity. The hybrid DNN demonstrates not only the complementarity between acoustic and phoneme features but also the temporality of phoneme features in a sequence. Our experiments show that the hybrid DNN outperforms existing methods and delivers a remarkable performance in FM broadcasting TI-SV.

Xiao Li

Xiao Chen

Rui Fu

Xiao Hu

Mintong Chen

Kun Niu

Learning Deep Embedding with Acoustic and Phoneme Features for Speaker Recognition in FM Broadcasting

With the rise of deep neural networks, the performance of biometric systems has increased tremendously. Biometric systems for face recognition are now used in everyday life, e.g., border control, crime prevention, or personal device access control. Although the accuracy of face recognition systems is generally high, they are not without flaws. Many biometric systems have been found to exhibit demographic bias, resulting in different demographic groups being not recognized with the same accuracy. This is especially true for facial recognition due to demographic factors, e.g., gender and skin color. While many previous works already reported demographic bias, this work aims to reduce demographic bias for biometric face recognition applications. In this regard, 12 face recognition systems are benchmarked regarding biometric recognition performance as well as demographic differentials, i.e., fairness. Subsequently, multiple fusion techniques are applied with the goal to improve the fairness in contrast to single systems. The experimental results show that it is possible to improve the fairness regarding single demographics, e.g., skin color or gender, while improving fairness for demographic subgroups turns out to be more challenging.

Jascha Kolberg

Yannik Schäfer

Christian Rathgeb

On the Potential of Algorithm Fusion for Demographic Bias Mitigation in Face Recognition

The widespread dissemination of high-fidelity fake faces created by face forgery techniques has caused serious trust concerns and ethical issues in modern society. Consequently, face forgery detection has emerged as a prominent topic of research to prevent technology abuse. Although, most existing face forgery detectors demonstrate success when evaluating high-quality faces under intra-dataset scenarios, they often overfit manipulation-specific artifacts and lack robustness to postprocessing operations. In this work, we design an innovative dual-branch collaboration framework that leverages the strengths of the transformer and CNN to thoroughly dig into the multimodal forgery artifacts from both a global and local perspective. Specifically, a novel adaptive noise trace enhancement module (ANTEM) is proposed to remove high-level face content while amplifying more generalized forgery artifacts in the noise domain. Then, the transformer-based branch can track long-range noise features. Meanwhile, considering that subtle forgery artifacts could be described in the frequency domain even in a compression scenario, a multilevel frequency-aware module (MFAM) is developed and further applied to the CNN-based branch to extract complementary frequency-aware clues. Besides, we incorporate a collaboration strategy involving cross-entropy loss and single center loss to enhance the learning of more generalized representations by optimizing the fusion features of the dual branch. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets substantiate the superior generalization and robustness of our framework when compared to the competing approaches.

Yi Zhao

Xin Jin

Song Gao

Liwen Wu

Shaowen Yao

Qian Jiang

Face Forgery Detection with Long-Range Noise Features and Multilevel Frequency-Aware Clues

This paper studies the impact of illumination direction and bundle width on finger vascular pattern imaging and recognition performance. A qualitative theoretical model is presented to explain the projection of finger blood vessels on the skin. A series of experiments were conducted using a scanner of our design with illumination from the top, a single-direction side (left or right), and narrow or wide beams. A new dataset was collected for the experiments, containing 4,428 NIR images of finger vein patterns captured under well-controlled conditions to minimize position and rotation angle differences between different sessions. Top illumination performs well because of more homogenous, which enhances a larger number of visible veins. Narrower bundles of light do not affect which veins are visible, but they reduce the overexposure at finger boundaries and increase the quality of vascular pattern images. The narrow beam achieves the best performance with 0% of FNMR@FMR0.01%, and the wide beam consistently results in a higher false nonmatch rate. The comparison of left- and right-side illumination has the highest error rates because only the veins in the middle of the finger are visible in both images. Different directional illumination may be interoperable since they produce the same vascular pattern and principally are the projected shadows on the finger surface. Score and image fusion for right- and left-side result in recognition performance similar to that obtained with top illumination, indicating the vein patterns are independent of illumination direction. All results of these experiments support the proposed model.

Pesigrihastamadya Normakristagaluh

Geert J. Laanstra

Luuk J. Spreeuwers

Raymond N. J. Veldhuis

The Impact of Illumination on Finger Vascular Pattern Recognition

Gender classification on normalized iris images has been previously attempted with varying degrees of success. In these previous studies, it has been shown that occlusion masks may introduce gender information; occlusion masks are used in iris recognition to remove non-iris elements. When, the goal is to classify the gender using exclusively the iris texture, the presence of gender information in the masks may result in apparently higher accuracy, thereby not reflecting the actual gender information present in the iris. However, no measures have been taken to eliminate this information while preserving as much iris information as possible. We propose a novel method to assess the gender information present in the iris more accurately by eliminating gender information in the masks. This consists of pairing iris with similar masks and different gender, generating a paired mask using the OR operator, and applying this mask to the iris. Additionally, we manually fix iris segmentation errors to study their impact on the gender classification. Our results show that occlusion masks can account for 6.92% of the gender classification accuracy on average. Therefore, works aiming to perform gender classification using the iris texture from normalized iris images should eliminate this correlation.

Claudio Yáñez

Juan E. Tapia

Claudio A. Perez

Impact of Occlusion Masks on Gender Classification from Iris Texture

The extraction of ROI (region of interest) was a key step in noncontact palm vein recognition, which was crucial for the subsequent feature extraction and feature matching. A noncontact palm vein ROI extraction algorithm based on the improved HRnet for keypoints localization was proposed for dealing with hand gesture irregularities, translation, scaling, and rotation in complex backgrounds. To reduce the computation time and model size for ultimate deploying in low-cost embedded systems, this improved HRnet was designed to be lightweight by reconstructing the residual block structure and adopting depth-separable convolution, which greatly reduced the model size and improved the inference speed of network forward propagation. Next, the palm vein ROI localization and palm vein recognition are processed in self-built dataset and two public datasets (CASIA and TJU-PV). The proposed improved HRnet algorithm achieved 97.36% accuracy for keypoints detection on self-built palm vein dataset and 98.23% and 98.74% accuracy for keypoints detection on two public palm vein datasets (CASIA and TJU-PV), respectively. The model size was only 0.45 M, and on a CPU with a clock speed of 3 GHz, the average running time of ROI extraction for one image was 0.029 s. Based on the keypoints and corresponding ROI extraction, the equal error rate (EER) of palm vein recognition was 0.000362%, 0.014541%, and 0.005951% and the false nonmatch rate was 0.000001%, 11.034725%, and 4.613714% (false match rate: 0.01%) in the self-built dataset, TJU-PV, and CASIA, respectively. The experimental result showed that the proposed algorithm was feasible and effective and provided a reliable experimental basis for the research of palm vein recognition technology.

Fen Dai

Ziyang Wang

Xiangqun Zou

Rongwen Zhang

Xiaoling Deng

Noncontact Palm Vein ROI Extraction Based on Improved Lightweight HRnet in Complex Backgrounds

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IET Biometrics publishes original research and review articles in any topic which can increase our understanding of biometric systems, signal future developments and applications for biometrics, or promote greater practical uptake for relevant technologies.&nbsp;

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IET Biometrics publishes original research and review articles in any topic which can increase our understanding of biometric systems, signal future developments and applications for biometrics, or promote greater practical uptake for relevant technologies. 

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