The next biometric identifier? 3D images of your finger veins

Technology.org  November 10, 2020 Biometric methods based on finger veins, as compared to face and fingerprints, obviate privacy concerns and degradation due to wear, age, and obscuration. However, they are 2D and are fundamentally limited by conventional imaging and tissue-light scattering. A team of researchers in the US (SUNY Buffalo, industry) has developed a method of 3D finger vein biometric authentication based on photoacoustic tomography. Using a compact photoacoustic tomography setup and a novel recognition algorithm, they demonstrated the advantages of the 3D biometrics method. Tests of the method on people showed that it can correctly accept or reject an […]

Image cloaking tool thwarts facial recognition programs

TechXplore  August 5, 2020 To help individuals inoculate their images against unauthorized facial recognition models, researchers at the University of Chicago have developed a system called Fawkes. It helps individuals add imperceptible pixel-level changes (they call “cloaks”) to their own photos before releasing them. When used to train facial recognition models, the “cloaked” images produce functional models that consistently cause normal images of the user to be misidentified. In experiments Fawkes provided 95+% protection against user recognition regardless of how trackers train their models. They have shown that Fawkes is robust against a variety of countermeasures that try to detect […]

The Bioacoustic Signatures of Our Bodies Can Reveal Our Identities

IEEE Spectrum  November 4, 2019 A team of researchers in South Korea is exploring whether the unique bioacoustic signatures created as sound waves pass through humans can be used to identify individuals. They developed a bioacoustic frequency spectroscopy system and applied it to the fingers to obtain information on the anatomy, biomechanics, and biomaterial properties of the tissues. The modulated microvibrations propagated through our body could capture a unique spectral trait of a person and the biomechanical transfer characteristics persisted for two months and resulted in 97.16% accuracy of identity authentication in 41 subjects. In the current version it does […]

Preventing manipulation in automated face recognition

Fraunhofer Research  October 1, 2019 In morphing processes two facial images are melded into a single synthetic facial image that contains the characteristics of both persons. As a result, biometric face recognition systems authenticate the identity of both persons based on this manipulated photo. Morphing attacks can take place before or during the process of applying for an ID document. To address this problem researchers in Germany are developing a process that identifies the image anomalies that occur during digital image processing focusing on analyzing and researching simulated imaging data using image processing, machine learning methods, and deep neural networks […]

IBM to release world’s largest facial analytics dataset

Phys.org  June 27, 2018 One of the biggest issues causing bias in facial analysis is the lack of diverse data to train systems on. IBM is releasing a facial attribute and identity training dataset of over 1 million images to improve facial analysis. It is annotated with attributes and identity, leveraging geo-tags from Flickr images to balance data from multiple countries and active learning tools to reduce sample selection bias. Unlike the current datasets the IBM dataset has a single capability to match attributes (hair color, facial hair, etc.) and identify multiple images of the same person. A dataset which […]

Face recognition technology that works in the dark

Science Daily  April 16, 2018 Researchers at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory used advanced domain adaptation techniques based on deep neural networks to overcome the challenge of cross-spectrum, or heterogeneous, face recognition to process thermal image of a person’s face captured in low-light or nighttime conditions. The fundamental approach is composed of two key parts: a non-linear regression model that maps a given thermal image into a corresponding visible latent representation and an optimization problem that projects the latent projection back into the image space. In face verification experiments using a common open source deep neural network architecture, their approach […]