Abstract

In the field of biometric security, the quality assessment of fingerprint images is paramount for boosting the accuracy of fingerprint recognition systems. These systems are fundamental for the secure and efficient authentication and identification of individuals. Our research presents FRBQ (Fingerprint Recognition-Based Quality), an innovative quality metric designed to navigate the limitations of the NFIQ2 model. FRBQ exploits deep learning algorithms in a weakly supervised setting and utilizes matching scores from DeepPrint, a Fixed-Length Fingerprint Representation Model. Each score is paired with labels indicating the robustness of fingerprint image matches. However, in a fully referenced setting, these labels can be subjective, lacking a clear definition of what "image quality" inherently means. This weakly labeled approach strives to capture diverse perspectives on image quality, potentially making it a more encompassing metric. In comparison to NFIQ2, our research showcases the superior performance of the FRBQ model. It not only correlates better with recognition scores but also effectively evaluates challenging images that NFIQ2 struggles with. Validated by the esteemed FVC 2004 dataset, FRBQ proves its efficacy in fingerprint image quality assessment. This study underscores the transformative potential of AI in biometrics, emphasizing its capability to capture details that traditional methods might overlook. Our work stresses the critical role of precise quality assessment in the evolution of fingerprint recognition systems.

Abstract

Fingerprint recognition stands as a pivotal component of biometric technology, with diverse applications from identity verification to advanced search tools. In this paper, we propose a unique method for deriving robust fingerprint representations by leveraging enhancement-based pre-training. Building on the achievements of U- Net-based fingerprint enhancement, our method employs a specialized encoder to derive representations from fingerprint images in a self-supervised manner. We further refine these representations, aiming to enhance the verification capabilities. Our experimental results, tested on publicly available fingerprint datasets, reveal a marked improvement in verification performance against established self-supervised training techniques. Our findings not only highlight the effectiveness of our method but also pave the way for potential advancements. Crucially, our research indicates that it s feasible to extract meaningful fingerprint representations from de- graded images without relying on enhanced samples.

Abstract

The increasing prominence of fingerprint recognition as a biomet ric identifier has made it more vulnerable to presentation attacks, specifically non-distal attacks that exploit ridge and minutiae pat terns foundinnon-distalphalanges.Inthisstudy,wepresentpresen tation attacks through non-distal/toe prints and a state-of-the-art lightweight inverted residual network that excels at differentiating between distal and non-distal prints, providing unrivaled perfor mance in terms of accuracy, inference time, and false negative rate (FNR). Our proposed model surpasses other statistical machine learning methods, such as variable-margin SVM, and lightweight models like MobileNet v2, MobileNet v3, and ResNet18. We meticu lously evaluate our model using a diverse array of datasets, includ ing the NIST dataset, an in-house collected dataset, a toe dataset, a synthetic dataset generated by VeriFinger software, and a six-class dataset. To assess performance when only minutiae points are avail able, we develop analgorithmthat converts fingerprints to minutiae points and subsequently reconstructs fingerprints. Furthermore, we examine the ridge density of distal and non-distal prints across datasets, emphasizing their similarities and underscoring the need for advanced detection techniques. To the best of our knowledge, this study represents the first endeavor to propose a solution for presentation attack detection in non-distal phalanges. Our research demonstrate various challenges of presentation attacks, the effectiveness of our approach, which holds the potential to significantly influence the domain of finger print recognition and security. By sharing our dataset, model, and experimental details with the research community, we aim to foster further advancements in this crucial area. Upon publication, we will make our dataset and experimental details available alongside the paper

Abstract

Deployment of Face Recognition systems on the edge has seen significant growth due to advancements in hardware design and efficient neural architectures. However, tailoring SOTA Face Recognition solutions to a specific edge device is still not easy and is vastly unexplored. Although, benchmark data is available for some combinations of model, device, and framework, it is neither comprehensive nor scalable. We propose an approximation to determine the relationship between a model and its inference time in an edge deployment scenario. Using a small number of data points, we are able to predict the throughput of custom models in an explainable manner. The prediction errors are small enough to be considered noise in observations. We also analyze which approaches are most efficient and make better use of hardware in terms of accuracy and error rates to gain a better understanding of their behaviour. Related & necessary modules such as Face Anti-Spoofing are also analyzed. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to tackle this issue directly. The data and code along with future updates to the models and hardware will be made available at https://github.com/AyanBiswas19/Resource_Efficient_FR.

Abstract

Biometric signal consisting of irrelevant or non-distinctive features can contain useful correlational properties that privacy-preserving verification schemes can exploit. While an efficient protocol for iris verification using noise has been presented, it is not applicable to other widely used modalities, i.e., face and fingerprint, since the methods of noise extraction and comparison are different. In this work, we design a verification protocol for secure dot product computation and also propose noise extraction mechanisms for face and fingerprint modalities. We evaluate the performance of the protocol on CFP, LFW, CelebA, FVC 2004 DB1A, DB2A, DB3A, and SOCOFing datasets. While the protocol exhibits a slight degradation in accuracy, it provides information-theoretic security with a practical computational complexity.

Abstract

For decades, fingerprint recognition has been prevalent for security, forensics, and other biometric applications. However, the availability of good-quality fingerprints is challenging, making recognition difficult. Fingerprint images might be degraded with a poor ridge structure and noisy or less contrasting backgrounds. Hence, fingerprint enhancement plays a vital role in the early stages of the fingerprint recognition/verification pipeline. In this paper, we investigate and improvise the encoder-decoder style architecture and suggest intuitive modifications to U-Net to enhance low-quality fingerprints effectively. We investigate the use of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) for fingerprint enhancement and use a wavelet attention module instead of max pooling which proves advantageous for our task. Moreover, we replace regular convolutions with depthwise separable convolutions, which significantly reduces the memory footprint of the model without degrading the performance. We also demonstrate that incorporating domain knowledge with fingerprint minutiae prediction task can improve fingerprint reconstruction through multi-task learning. Furthermore, we also integrate the orientation estimation task to propagate the knowledge of ridge orientations to enhance the performance further. We present the experimental results and evaluate our model on FVC 2002 and NIST SD302 databases to show the effectiveness of our approach compared to previous works.

Abstract

A system for generating high-resolution de-warped omni-directional stereo image from captured omni-directional stereo image by correcting optical distortions using projection patterns is provided. The system includes a projection pattern capturing arrangement, a projector or a display, and a de-warping server. The projection pattern capturing arrangement includes one or more omnidirectional cameras to capture projection patterns from the captured omni-directional stereo image from each omni-directional stereo camera. The projector or the display displays the projection patterns. The de-warping server obtain the projection patterns and processes the projection patterns to generate high resolution de-warped omni-directional stereo image by correcting optical distortions in the captured omni-directional stereo image and mapping the captured omni-directional stereo image and the high resolution de-warped omni-directional stereo image.

Abstract

Evaluating the risk level of adversarial images is essential for safely deploying face authentication models in the real world. Popular approaches for physical-world attacks, such as print or replay attacks, suffer from some limitations, like including physical and geometrical artifacts. Recently adversarial attacks have gained attraction, which try to digitally deceive the learning strategy of a recognition system using slight modifications to the captured image. While most previous research assumes that the adversarial image could be digitally fed into the authentication systems, this is not always the case for systems deployed in the real world. This paper demonstrates the vulnerability of face authentication systems to adversarial images in physical world scenarios. We propose AdvGen, an automated Generative Adversarial Network, to simulate print and replay attacks and generate adversarial images that can fool state-of-the-art PADs in a physical domain attack setting. Using this attack strategy, the attack success rate goes up to 82.01%. We test AdvGen extensively on four datasets and ten state-of-the-art PADs. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our attack by conducting experiments in a realistic, physical environment.

Abstract

Deep Learning on face recognition problems has shown extremely high accuracy owing to their ability in finding strongly discriminating features. However, face images in the wild show variations in pose, lighting, expressions, and the presence of facial attributes (for example eyeglasses). We ask, why then are these vari- ations not detected and used during the matching process? We demonstrate that this is indeed possible while restricting ourselves to facial attribute variation, to prove the case in point. We show two ways of doing so. a) By using the face attribute labels as a form of prior, we bin the matching template pairs into three bins depend- ing on whether each template of the matching pair possesses a given facial attribute or not. By operating on each bin and averaging the result, we better the EER of SOTA by over 1 % over a large set of matching pairs. b) We use the attribute labels and correlate them with each neuron of an embedding generated by a SOTA architecture pre-trained DNN on a large Face dataset and fine-tuned on face-attribute labels. We then suppress a set of maximally correlating neurons and perform matching after doing so. We demonstrate this improves the EER by over 2 %.

Abstract

3𝐷 fingerprint capture is less sensitive to skin moisture levels and avoids skin deformation, which is common in contact-based sensors, in addition to capturing depth information. Unfortunately, its adoption is limited due to high cost and system complexity. Photometric stereo provides an opportunity to build low-cost, simple sensors capable of high-quality 3𝐷 capture. However, it assumes that the surface being imaged is lambertian (unlike our fingers). We introduce the Split and Knit algorithm (SnK), a 3𝐷 reconstruction pipeline based on the photometric stereo for finger surfaces. It introduces an efficient way of estimating the direct illumination component, thus allowing us to do a higher-quality reconstruction of the entire finger surface. The algorithm also introduces a novel method to obtain the overall finger shape under NIR illumination, all using a single camera. Finally, we combine the overall finger shape and the ridge-valley point cloud to obtain a 3𝐷 finger phalange. The high-quality 3𝐷 reconstruction also results in better matching accuracy of the captured fingerprints. 1