Person Identification and Gender Classification Based on Vision Transformers for Periocular Images

Simple SummaryThe idea of identifying persons using the fewest traits from the face, particularly the area surrounding the eye, was carried out in light of the present COVID-19 scenario. This may also be applied to doctors working in hospitals, the military, and even in certain faiths where the face is mostly covered, except the eyes. The most recent advancement in computer vision, called vision transformers, has been tested for the UBIPr dataset for different architectures. The proposed model is pretrained on an openly available ImageNet dataset with 1 K classes and 1.3 M pictures before using it on the real dataset of interest, and accordingly the input images are scaled to 224 × 224. The PyTorch framework, which is particularly helpful for creating complicated neural networks, has been utilized to create our models. To avoid overfitting, the stratified K-Fold technique is used to make the model less prone to overfitting. The accuracy results have proven that these techniques are highly effective for both person identification and gender classification.AbstractMany biometrics advancements have been widely used for security applications. This field's evolution began with fingerprints and continued with periocular imaging, which has gained popularity due to the pandemic scenario. CNN (convolutional neural networks) has revolutionized the computer vision domain by demonstrating various state-of-the-art results (performance metrics) with the help of deep-learning-based architectures. The latest transformation has happened with the invention of transformers, which are used in NLP (natural language processing) and are presently being adapted for computer vision. In this work, we have implemented five different ViT- (vision transformer) based architectures for person identification and gender classification. The experiment was performed on the ViT architectures and their modified counterparts. In general, the samples selected for train:val:test splits are random, and the trained model may get affected by overfitting. To overcome this, we have performed 5-fold cross-validation-based analysis. The experiment's performance matrix indicates that the proposed method achieved better results for gender classification as well as person identification. We also experimented with train-val-test partitions for benchmarking with existing architectures and observed significant improvements. We utilized the publicly available UBIPr dataset for performing this experimentation.

One shot learning approach for cross spectrum periocular verification.

The use of face mask during the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the popularity of the periocular biometrics in surveillance applications. Despite of the rapid advancements in this area, matching images over cross spectrum is still a challenging problem. Reason may be two-fold 1) variations in image illumination 2) small size of available data sets and/or class imbalance problem. This paper proposes Siamese architecture based convolutional neural networks which works on the concept of one-shot classification. In one shot classification, network requires a single training example from each class to train the complete model which may lead to reduce the need of large dataset as well as doesn't matter whether the dataset is imbalance. The proposed architectures comprise of identical subnetworks with shared weights whose performance is assessed on three publicly available databases namely IMP, UTIRIS and PolyU with four different loss functions namely Binary cross entropy loss, Hinge loss, contrastive loss and Triplet loss. In order to mitigate the inherent illumination variations of cross spectrum images CLAHE was used to preprocess images. Extensive experiments show that the proposed Siamese CNN model with triplet loss function outperforms the states of the art periocular verification methods for cross, mono and multi spectral periocular image matching.

Who is behind the Mask: Periocular Biometrics when Face Recognition Fails

The ongoing COVID-19 epidemic has emphasized the importance of hygienic and contactless identification au-Thentication. On the other hand, the pandemic resulted in the widespread usage of face masks, which are still necessary to keep the infection under control. The consequence of wearing a mask on facial recognition is a sensitive yet understudied issue right now. Furthermore, the performance and reliability of contactless identity verification using facial recognition can indeed be affected by different types, sizes, and colors of masks. Therefore, this study evaluates the performance of face recognition system with various kinds of occlusions. Periocular region based authentication, especially when only a partial face is available, is proposed. Experimental results prove the reliability, robustness, and superiority of periocular recognition over the face under studied circumstances. © 2022 IEEE.

An optimal feature enriched region of interest (ROI) extraction for periocular biometric system.

With the onset of COVID-19 pandemic, wearing of face mask became essential and the face occlusion created by the masks deteriorated the performance of the face biometric systems. In this situation, the use of periocular region (region around the eye) as a biometric trait for authentication is gaining attention since it is the most visible region when masks are used. One important issue in periocular biometrics is the identification of an optimal size periocular ROI which contains enough features for authentication. The state of the art ROI extraction algorithms use fixed size rectangular ROI calculated based on some reference points like center of the iris or centre of the eye without considering the shape of the periocular region of an individual. This paper proposes a novel approach to extract optimum size periocular ROIs of two different shapes (polygon and rectangular) by using five reference points (inner and outer canthus points, two end points and the midpoint of eyebrow) in order to accommodate the complete shape of the periocular region of an individual. The performance analysis on UBIPr database using CNN models validated the fact that both the proposed ROIs contain enough information to identify a person wearing face mask.

A novel periocular biometrics solution for authentication during Covid-19 pandemic situation.

The outbreak of novel coronavirus in 2019 has shaken the whole world and it quickly evolved as a global pandemic, placing everyone in a panic situation. Considering its long-term effects on day to day lives, the necessity of wearing face mask and social distancing brings in picture the requirement of a contact less biometric system for all future authentication systems. One of the solutions is to use periocular biometric as it does not need physical contact like fingerprint biometric and is able to identify even people wearing face masks. Since, the periocular region is a small area as compared to face, extraction of required number of features from that small region is the major concern to make the system highly robust. This research proposes a feature fusion approach which combines the handcrafted features HOG, non-handcrafted features extracted using pretrained CNN models and gender related features extracted using a five layer CNN model. The proposed feature fusion approach is evaluated using multiclass SVM classifier with three different benchmark databases, UBIPr, Color FERET and Ethnic Ocular as well as for three non-ideal scenarios i.e. the effect of eyeglasses, effect of eye occlusion and pose variations. The proposed approach shows remarkable improvement in performance over pre-existing approaches.