Periocular Data Fusion for Age and Gender Classification.

In recent years, the study of soft biometrics has gained increasing interest in the security and business sectors. These characteristics provide limited biometric information about the individual; hence, it is possible to increase performance by combining numerous data sources to overcome the accuracy limitations of a single trait. In this research, we provide a study on the fusion of periocular features taken from pupils, fixations, and blinks to achieve a demographic classification, i.e., by age and gender. A data fusion approach is implemented for this purpose. To build a trust evaluation of the selected biometric traits, we first employ a concatenation scheme for fusion at the feature level and, at the score level, transformation and classifier-based score fusion approaches (e.g., weighted sum, weighted product, Bayesian rule, etc.). Data fusion enables improved performance and the synthesis of acquired information, as well as its secure storage and protection of the multi-biometric system's original biometric models. The combination of these soft biometrics characteristics combines flawlessly the need to protect individual privacy and to have a strong discriminatory element. The results are quite encouraging, with an age classification accuracy of 84.45% and a gender classification accuracy of 84.62%, respectively. The results obtained encourage the studies on periocular area to detect soft biometrics to be applied when the lower part of the face is not visible.

FASHE: A FrActal Based Strategy for Head Pose Estimation.

Head pose estimation (HPE) represents a topic central to many relevant research fields and characterized by a wide application range. In particular, HPE performed using a singular RGB frame is particular suitable to be applied at best-frame-selection problems. This explains a growing interest witnessed by a large number of contributions, most of which exploit deep learning architectures and require extensive training sessions to achieve accuracy and robustness in estimating head rotations on three axes. However, methods alternative to machine learning approaches could be capable of similar if not better performance. To this regard, we present FASHE, an approach based on partitioned iterated function systems (PIFS) to represent auto-similarities within face image through a contractive affine function transforming the domain blocks extracted only once by a single frontal reference image, in a good approximation of the range blocks which the target image has been partitioned into. Pose estimation is achieved by finding the closest match between fractal code of target image and a reference array by means of Hamming distance. The results of experiments conducted exceed the state of the art on both Biwi and Ponting'04 datasets as well as approaching those of the best performing methods on the challenging AFLW2000 database. In addition, the applications to GOTCHA Video Dataset demonstrate that FASHE successfully operates in-the-wild.