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This paper summarises the Competition on Presentation Attack Detection on ID Cards (PAD-IDCard) held at the 2024 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB2024). The competition attracted a total of ten registered teams, both from academia and industry. In the end, the participating teams submitted five valid submissions, with eight models to be evaluated by the organisers. The competition presented an independent assessment of current state-of-the-art algorithms. Today, no independent evaluation on cross-dataset is available; therefore, this work determined the state-of-the-art on ID cards. To reach this goal, a sequestered test set and baseline algorithms were used to evaluate and compare all the proposals. The sequestered test dataset contains ID cards from four different countries. In summary, a team that chose to be "Anonymous" reached the best average ranking results of 74.80%, followed very closely by the "IDVC" team with 77.65%.

In the last few years, face morphing has been shown to be a complex challenge for Face Recognition Systems (FRS). Thus, the evaluation of other biometric modalities such as fingerprint, iris, and others must be explored and evaluated to enhance biometric systems. This work proposes an end-to-end framework to produce iris morphs at the image level, creating morphs from Periocular iris images. This framework considers different stages such as pair subject selection, segmentation, morph creation, and a new iris recognition system. In order to create realistic morphed images, two approaches for subject selection are explored: random selection and similar radius size selection. A vulnerability analysis and a Single Morphing Attack Detection algorithm were also explored. The results show that this approach obtained very realistic images that can confuse conventional iris recognition systems., Comment: in revision process

Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) is a relevant topic that aims to detect attempts by unauthorised individuals to access a "valid" identity. One of the main scenarios is printing morphed images and submitting the respective print in a passport application process. Today, small datasets are available to train the MAD algorithm because of privacy concerns and the limitations resulting from the effort associated with the printing and scanning of images at large numbers. In order to improve the detection capabilities and spot such morphing attacks, it will be necessary to have a larger and more realistic dataset representing the passport application scenario with the diversity of devices and the resulting printed scanned or compressed images. Creating training data representing the diversity of attacks is a very demanding task because the training material is developed manually. This paper proposes two different methods based on transfer-transfer for automatically creating digital print/scan face images and using such images in the training of a Morphing Attack Detection algorithm. Our proposed method can reach an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 3.84% and 1.92% on the FRGC/FERET database when including our synthetic and texture-transfer print/scan with 600 dpi to handcrafted images, respectively., Comment: Paper under revision process in Journal

This paper evaluated the impact of synthetic images on Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) using a Siamese network with a semi-hard-loss function. Intra and cross-dataset evaluations were performed to measure synthetic image generalisation capabilities using a cross-dataset for evaluation. Three different pre-trained networks were used as feature extractors from traditional MobileNetV2, MobileNetV3 and EfficientNetB0. Our results show that MAD trained on EfficientNetB0 from FERET, FRGCv2, and FRLL can reach a lower error rate in comparison with SOTA. Conversely, worse performances were reached when the system was trained only with synthetic images. A mixed approach (synthetic + digital) database may help to improve MAD and reduce the error rate. This fact shows that we still need to keep going with our efforts to include synthetic images in the training process., Comment: Arxiv version of CIARP2023 - fixed typo errors

Various face image datasets intended for facial biometrics research were created via web-scraping, i.e. the collection of images publicly available on the internet. This work presents an approach to detect both exactly and nearly identical face image duplicates, using file and image hashes. The approach is extended through the use of face image preprocessing. Additional steps based on face recognition and face image quality assessment models reduce false positives, and facilitate the deduplication of the face images both for intra- and inter-subject duplicate sets. The presented approach is applied to five datasets, namely LFW, TinyFace, Adience, CASIA-WebFace, and C-MS-Celeb (a cleaned MS-Celeb-1M variant). Duplicates are detected within every dataset, with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of duplicates for all except LFW. Face recognition and quality assessment experiments indicate a minor impact on the results through the duplicate removal. The final deduplication data is publicly available., Comment: Accepted at the 13th International Conference on Pattern Recognition Applications and Methods (ICPRAM 2024)

The accurate detection of ID card Presentation Attacks (PA) is becoming increasingly important due to the rising number of online/remote services that require the presentation of digital photographs of ID cards for digital onboarding or authentication. Furthermore, cybercriminals are continuously searching for innovative ways to fool authentication systems to gain unauthorized access to these services. Although advances in neural network design and training have pushed image classification to the state of the art, one of the main challenges faced by the development of fraud detection systems is the curation of representative datasets for training and evaluation. The handcrafted creation of representative presentation attack samples often requires expertise and is very time-consuming, thus an automatic process of obtaining high-quality data is highly desirable. This work explores ID card Presentation Attack Instruments (PAI) in order to improve the generation of samples with four Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) based image translation models and analyses the effectiveness of the generated data for training fraud detection systems. Using open-source data, we show that synthetic attack presentations are an adequate complement for additional real attack presentations, where we obtain an EER performance increase of 0.63% points for print attacks and a loss of 0.29% for screen capture attacks.

This paper presents a summary of the Competition on Face Presentation Attack Detection Based on Privacy-aware Synthetic Training Data (SynFacePAD 2023) held at the 2023 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2023). The competition attracted a total of 8 participating teams with valid submissions from academia and industry. The competition aimed to motivate and attract solutions that target detecting face presentation attacks while considering synthetic-based training data motivated by privacy, legal and ethical concerns associated with personal data. To achieve that, the training data used by the participants was limited to synthetic data provided by the organizers. The submitted solutions presented innovations and novel approaches that led to outperforming the considered baseline in the investigated benchmarks., Comment: Accepted at IJCB2 023

This paper describes the results of the 2023 edition of the ''LivDet'' series of iris presentation attack detection (PAD) competitions. New elements in this fifth competition include (1) GAN-generated iris images as a category of presentation attack instruments (PAI), and (2) an evaluation of human accuracy at detecting PAI as a reference benchmark. Clarkson University and the University of Notre Dame contributed image datasets for the competition, composed of samples representing seven different PAI categories, as well as baseline PAD algorithms. Fraunhofer IGD, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, and Hochschule Darmstadt contributed results for a total of eight PAD algorithms to the competition. Accuracy results are analyzed by different PAI types, and compared to human accuracy. Overall, the Fraunhofer IGD algorithm, using an attention-based pixel-wise binary supervision network, showed the best-weighted accuracy results (average classification error rate of 37.31%), while the Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture's algorithm won when equal weights for each PAI were given (average classification rate of 22.15%). These results suggest that iris PAD is still a challenging problem., Comment: 8 pages, IJCB 2023

Face Morphing Attacks pose a threat to the security of identity documents, especially with respect to a subsequent access control process, because it enables both individuals involved to exploit the same document. In this study, face embeddings serve two purposes: pre-selecting images for large-scale Morphing Attack generation and detecting potential Morphing Attacks. We build upon previous embedding studies in both use cases using the MagFace model. For the first objective, we employ an pre-selection algorithm that pairs individuals based on face embedding similarity. We quantify the attack potential of differently morphed face images to compare the usability of pre-selection in automatically generating numerous successful Morphing Attacks. Regarding the second objective, we compare embeddings from two state-of-the-art face recognition systems in terms of their ability to detect Morphing Attacks. Our findings demonstrate that ArcFace and MagFace provide valuable face embeddings for image pre-selection. Both open-source and COTS face recognition systems are susceptible to generated attacks, particularly when pre-selection is based on embeddings rather than random pairing which was only constrained by soft biometrics. More accurate face recognition systems exhibit greater vulnerability to attacks, with COTS systems being the most susceptible. Additionally, MagFace embeddings serve as a robust alternative for detecting morphed face images compared to the previously used ArcFace embeddings. The results endorse the advantages of face embeddings in more effective image pre-selection for face morphing and accurate detection of morphed face images. This is supported by extensive analysis of various designed attacks. The MagFace model proves to be a powerful alternative to the commonly used ArcFace model for both objectives, pre-selection and attack detection.

This paper proposes an explainable visualisation of different face feature extraction algorithms that enable the detection of bona fide and morphing images for single morphing attack detection. The feature extraction is based on raw image, shape, texture, frequency and compression. This visualisation may help to develop a Graphical User Interface for border policies and specifically for border guard personnel that have to investigate details of suspect images. A Random forest classifier was trained in a leave-one-out protocol on three landmarks-based face morphing methods and a StyleGAN-based morphing method for which morphed images are available in the FRLL database. For morphing attack detection, the Discrete Cosine-Transformation-based method obtained the best results for synthetic images and BSIF for landmark-based image features.

Nowadays, Presentation Attack Detection is a very active research area. Several databases are constituted in the state-of-the-art using images extracted from videos. One of the main problems identified is that many databases present a low-quality, small image size and do not represent an operational scenario in a real remote biometric system. Currently, these images are captured from smartphones with high-quality and bigger resolutions. In order to increase the diversity of image quality, this work presents a new PAD database based on open-access Flickr images called: "Flickr-PAD". Our new hand-made database shows high-quality printed and screen scenarios. This will help researchers to compare new approaches to existing algorithms on a wider database. This database will be available for other researchers. A leave-one-out protocol was used to train and evaluate three PAD models based on MobileNet-V3 (small and large) and EfficientNet-B0. The best result was reached with MobileNet-V3 large with BPCER10 of 7.08% and BPCER20 of 11.15%.

Fitness for Duty (FFD) techniques detects whether a subject is Fit to perform their work safely, which means no reduced alertness condition and security, or if they are Unfit, which means alertness condition reduced by sleepiness or consumption of alcohol and drugs. Human iris behaviour provides valuable information to predict FFD since pupil and iris movements are controlled by the central nervous system and are influenced by illumination, fatigue, alcohol, and drugs. This work aims to classify FFD using sequences of 8 iris images and to extract spatial and temporal information using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short Term Memory Networks (LSTM). Our results achieved a precision of 81.4\% and 96.9\% for the prediction of Fit and Unfit subjects, respectively. The results also show that it is possible to determine if a subject is under alcohol, drug, and sleepiness conditions. Sleepiness can be identified as the most difficult condition to be determined. This system opens a different insight into iris biometric applications.

Quality assessment algorithms can be used to estimate the utility of a biometric sample for the purpose of biometric recognition. "Error versus Discard Characteristic" (EDC) plots, and "partial Area Under Curve" (pAUC) values of curves therein, are generally used by researchers to evaluate the predictive performance of such quality assessment algorithms. An EDC curve depends on an error type such as the "False Non Match Rate" (FNMR), a quality assessment algorithm, a biometric recognition system, a set of comparisons each corresponding to a biometric sample pair, and a comparison score threshold corresponding to a starting error. To compute an EDC curve, comparisons are progressively discarded based on the associated samples' lowest quality scores, and the error is computed for the remaining comparisons. Additionally, a discard fraction limit or range must be selected to compute pAUC values, which can then be used to quantitatively rank quality assessment algorithms. This paper discusses and analyses various details for this kind of quality assessment algorithm evaluation, including general EDC properties, interpretability improvements for pAUC values based on a hard lower error limit and a soft upper error limit, the use of relative instead of discrete rankings, stepwise vs. linear curve interpolation, and normalisation of quality scores to a [0, 100] integer range. We also analyse the stability of quantitative quality assessment algorithm rankings based on pAUC values across varying pAUC discard fraction limits and starting errors, concluding that higher pAUC discard fraction limits should be preferred. The analyses are conducted both with synthetic data and with real face image and fingerprint data, with a focus on general modality-independent conclusions for EDC evaluations. Various EDC alternatives are discussed as well.

Lossy face image compression can degrade the image quality and the utility for the purpose of face recognition. This work investigates the effect of lossy image compression on a state-of-the-art face recognition model, and on multiple face image quality assessment models. The analysis is conducted over a range of specific image target sizes. Four compression types are considered, namely JPEG, JPEG 2000, downscaled PNG, and notably the new JPEG XL format. Frontal color images from the ColorFERET database were used in a Region Of Interest (ROI) variant and a portrait variant. We primarily conclude that JPEG XL allows for superior mean and worst case face recognition performance especially at lower target sizes, below approximately 5kB for the ROI variant, while there appears to be no critical advantage among the compression types at higher target sizes. Quality assessments from modern models correlate well overall with the compression effect on face recognition performance.

In this paper, an updated two-stage, end-to-end Presentation Attack Detection method for remote biometric verification systems of ID cards, based on MobileNetV2, is presented. Several presentation attack species such as printed, display, composite (based on cropped and spliced areas), plastic (PVC), and synthetic ID card images using different capture sources are used. This proposal was developed using a database consisting of 190.000 real case Chilean ID card images with the support of a third-party company. Also, a new framework called PyPAD, used to estimate multi-class metrics compliant with the ISO/IEC 30107-3 standard was developed, and will be made available for research purposes. Our method is trained on two convolutional neural networks separately, reaching BPCER\textsubscript{100} scores on ID cards attacks of 1.69\% and 2.36\% respectively. The two-stage method using both models together can reach a BPCER\textsubscript{100} score of 0.92\%.

Currently, it is ever more common to access online services for activities which formerly required physical attendance. From banking operations to visa applications, a significant number of processes have been digitised, especially since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, requiring remote biometric authentication of the user. On the downside, some subjects intend to interfere with the normal operation of remote systems for personal profit by using fake identity documents, such as passports and ID cards. Deep learning solutions to detect such frauds have been presented in the literature. However, due to privacy concerns and the sensitive nature of personal identity documents, developing a dataset with the necessary number of examples for training deep neural networks is challenging. This work explores three methods for synthetically generating ID card images to increase the amount of data while training fraud-detection networks. These methods include computer vision algorithms and Generative Adversarial Networks. Our results indicate that databases can be supplemented with synthetic images without any loss in performance for the print/scan Presentation Attack Instrument Species (PAIS) and a loss in performance of 1% for the screen capture PAIS.

Iris Recognition (IR) is one of the market's most reliable and accurate biometric systems. Today, it is challenging to build NIR-capturing devices under the premise of hardware price reduction. Commercial NIR sensors are protected from modification. The process of building a new device is not trivial because it is required to start from scratch with the process of capturing images with quality, calibrating operational distances, and building lightweight software such as eyes/iris detectors and segmentation sub-systems. In light of such challenges, this work aims to develop and implement iris recognition software in an embedding system and calibrate NIR in a contactless binocular setup. We evaluate and contrast speed versus performance obtained with two embedded computers and infrared cameras. Further, a lightweight segmenter sub-system called "Unet_xxs" is proposed, which can be used for iris semantic segmentation under restricted memory resources.

Non-referential face image quality assessment methods have gained popularity as a pre-filtering step on face recognition systems. In most of them, the quality score is usually designed with face matching in mind. However, a small amount of work has been done on measuring their impact and usefulness on Presentation Attack Detection (PAD). In this paper, we study the effect of quality assessment methods on filtering bona fide and attack samples, their impact on PAD systems, and how the performance of such systems is improved when training on a filtered (by quality) dataset. On a Vision Transformer PAD algorithm, a reduction of 20% of the training dataset by removing lower quality samples allowed us to improve the BPCER by 3% in a cross-dataset test.

This research proposes a new database and method to detect the reduction of alertness conditions due to alcohol, drug consumption and sleepiness deprivation from Near-Infra-Red (NIR) periocular eye images. The study focuses on determining the effect of external factors on the Central Nervous System (CNS). The goal is to analyse how this impacts iris and pupil movement behaviours and if it is possible to classify these changes with a standard iris NIR capture device. This paper proposes a modified MobileNetV2 to classify iris NIR images taken from subjects under alcohol/drugs/sleepiness influences. The results show that the MobileNetV2-based classifier can detect the Unfit alertness condition from iris samples captured after alcohol and drug consumption robustly with a detection accuracy of 91.3% and 99.1%, respectively. The sleepiness condition is the most challenging with 72.4%. For two-class grouped images belonging to the Fit/Unfit classes, the model obtained an accuracy of 94.0% and 84.0%, respectively, using a smaller number of parameters than the standard Deep learning Network algorithm. This work is a step forward in biometric applications for developing an automatic system to classify "Fitness for Duty" and prevent accidents due to alcohol/drug consumption and sleepiness., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2203.02488

This research proposes a method to detect alcohol consumption from Near-Infra-Red (NIR) periocular eye images. The study focuses on determining the effect of external factors such as alcohol on the Central Nervous System (CNS). The goal is to analyse how this impacts on iris and pupil movements and if it is possible to capture these changes with a standard iris NIR camera. This paper proposes a novel Fused Capsule Network (F-CapsNet) to classify iris NIR images taken under alcohol consumption subjects. The results show the F-CapsNet algorithm can detect alcohol consumption in iris NIR images with an accuracy of 92.3% using half of the parameters as the standard Capsule Network algorithm. This work is a step forward in developing an automatic system to estimate "Fitness for Duty" and prevent accidents due to alcohol consumption.

Face morphing attack detection is challenging and presents a concrete and severe threat for face verification systems. Reliable detection mechanisms for such attacks, which have been tested with a robust cross-database protocol and unknown morphing tools still is a research challenge. This paper proposes a framework following the Few-Shot-Learning approach that shares image information based on the siamese network using triplet-semi-hard-loss to tackle the morphing attack detection and boost the clustering classification process. This network compares a bona fide or potentially morphed image with triplets of morphing and bona fide face images. Our results show that this new network cluster the data points, and assigns them to classes in order to obtain a lower equal error rate in a cross-database scenario sharing only small image numbers from an unknown database. Few-shot learning helps to boost the learning process. Experimental results using a cross-datasets trained with FRGCv2 and tested with FERET and the AMSL open-access databases reduced the BPCER10 from 43% to 4.91% using ResNet50 and 5.50% for MobileNetV2.

The early detection of drowsiness has become vital to ensure the correct and safe development of several industries' tasks. Due to the transient mental state of a human subject between alertness and drowsiness, automated drowsiness detection is a complex problem to tackle. The electroencephalography signals allow us to record variations in an individual's brain's electrical potential, where each of them gives specific information about a subject's mental state. However, due to this type of signal's nature, its acquisition, in general, is complex, so it is hard to have a large volume of data to apply techniques of Deep Learning for processing and classification optimally. Nevertheless, Capsule Neural Networks are a brand-new Deep Learning algorithm proposed for work with reduced amounts of data. It is a robust algorithm to handle the data's hierarchical relationships, which is an essential characteristic for work with biomedical signals. Therefore, this paper presents a Deep Learning-based method for drowsiness detection with CapsNet by using a concatenation of spectrogram images of the electroencephalography signals channels. The proposed CapsNet model is compared with a Convolutional Neural Network, which is outperformed by the proposed model, which obtains an average accuracy of 86,44% and 87,57% of sensitivity against an average accuracy of 75,86% and 79,47% sensitivity for the CNN, showing that CapsNet is more suitable for this kind of datasets and tasks.

Removing the background in ID Card images is a real challenge for remote verification systems because many of the re-digitalised images present cluttered backgrounds, poor illumination conditions, distortion and occlusions. The background in ID Card images confuses the classifiers and the text extraction. Due to the lack of available images for research, this field represents an open problem in computer vision today. This work proposes a method for removing the background using semantic segmentation of ID Cards. In the end, images captured in the wild from the real operation, using a manually labelled dataset consisting of 45,007 images, with five types of ID Cards from three countries (Chile, Argentina and Mexico), including typical presentation attack scenarios, were used. This method can help to improve the following stages in a regular identity verification or document tampering detection system. Two Deep Learning approaches were explored, based on MobileUNet and DenseNet10. The best results were obtained using MobileUNet, with 6.5 million parameters. A Chilean ID Card's mean Intersection Over Union (IoU) was 0.9926 on a private test dataset of 4,988 images. The best results for the fused multi-country dataset of ID Card images from Chile, Argentina and Mexico reached an IoU of 0.9911. The proposed methods are lightweight enough to be used in real-time operation on mobile devices.

Face morphing attack detection is a challenging task. Automatic classification methods and manual inspection are realised in automatic border control gates to detect morphing attacks. Understanding how a machine learning system can detect morphed faces and the most relevant facial areas is crucial. Those relevant areas contain texture signals that allow us to separate the bona fide and the morph images. Also, it helps in the manual examination to detect a passport generated with morphed images. This paper explores features extracted from intensity, shape, texture, and proposes a feature selection stage based on the Mutual Information filter to select the most relevant and less redundant features. This selection allows us to reduce the workload and know the exact localisation of such areas to understand the morphing impact and create a robust classifier. The best results were obtained for the method based on Conditional Mutual Information and Shape features using only 500 features for FERET images and 800 features for FRGCv2 images from 1,048 features available. The eyes and nose are identified as the most critical areas to be analysed.

Biometric has been increasing in relevance these days since it can be used for several applications such as access control for instance. Unfortunately, with the increased deployment of biometric applications, we observe an increase of attacks. Therefore, algorithms to detect such attacks (Presentation Attack Detection (PAD)) have been increasing in relevance. The LivDet-2020 competition which focuses on Presentation Attacks Detection (PAD) algorithms have shown still open problems, specially for unknown attacks scenarios. In order to improve the robustness of biometric systems, it is crucial to improve PAD methods. This can be achieved by augmenting the number of presentation attack instruments (PAI) and bona fide images that are used to train such algorithms. Unfortunately, the capture and creation of presentation attack instruments and even the capture of bona fide images is sometimes complex to achieve. This paper proposes a novel PAI synthetically created (SPI-PAI) using four state-of-the-art GAN algorithms (cGAN, WGAN, WGAN-GP, and StyleGAN2) and a small set of periocular NIR images. A benchmark between GAN algorithms is performed using the Frechet Inception Distance (FID) between the generated images and the original images used for training. The best PAD algorithm reported by the LivDet-2020 competition was tested for us using the synthetic PAI which was obtained with the StyleGAN2 algorithm. Surprisingly, The PAD algorithm was not able to detect the synthetic images as a Presentation Attack, categorizing all of them as bona fide. Such results demonstrated the feasibility of synthetic images to fool presentation attacks detection algorithms and the need for such algorithms to be constantly updated and trained with a larger number of images and PAI scenarios.

This paper proposes a new framework to detect, segment, and estimate the localization of the eyes from a periocular Near-Infra-Red iris image under alcohol consumption. The purpose of the system is to measure the fitness for duty. Fitness systems allow us to determine whether a person is physically or psychologically able to perform their tasks. Our framework is based on an object detector trained from scratch to detect both eyes from a single image. Then, two efficient networks were used for semantic segmentation; a Criss-Cross attention network and DenseNet10, with only 122,514 and 210,732 parameters, respectively. These networks can find the pupil, iris, and sclera. In the end, the binary output eye mask is used for pupil and iris diameter estimation with high precision. Five state-of-the-art algorithms were used for this purpose. A mixed proposal reached the best results. A second contribution is establishing an alcohol behavior curve to detect the alcohol presence utilizing a stream of images captured from an iris instance. Also, a manually labeled database with more than 20k images was created. Our best method obtains a mean Intersection-over-Union of 94.54% with DenseNet10 with only 210,732 parameters and an error of only 1-pixel on average.

Geometric Semantic Genetic Programming (GSGP) is a state-of-the-art machine learning method based on evolutionary computation. GSGP performs search operations directly at the level of program semantics, which can be done more efficiently then operating at the syntax level like most GP systems. Efficient implementations of GSGP in C++ exploit this fact, but not to its full potential. This paper presents GSGP-CUDA, the first CUDA implementation of GSGP and the most efficient, which exploits the intrinsic parallelism of GSGP using GPUs. Results show speedups greater than 1,000X relative to the state-of-the-art sequential implementation., Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures

Iris pattern recognition has significantly improved the biometric authentication field due to its high stability and uniqueness. Such physical characteristics have played an essential role in security and other related areas. However, presentation attacks, also known as spoofing techniques, can bypass biometric authentication systems using artefacts such as printed images, artificial eyes, textured contact lenses, etc. Many liveness detection methods that improve the security of these systems have been proposed. The first International Iris Liveness Detection competition, where the effectiveness of liveness detection methods is evaluated, was first launched in 2013, and its latest iteration was held in 2020. This paper proposes a serial architecture based on a MobileNetV2 modification, trained from scratch to classify bona fide iris images versus presentation attack images. The bona fide class consists of live iris images, whereas the attack presentation instrument classes are comprised of cadaver, printed, and contact lenses images, for a total of four scenarios. All the images were pre-processed and weighted per class to present a fair evaluation. This proposal won the LivDet-Iris 2020 competition using two-class scenarios. Additionally, we present new three-class and four-class scenarios that further improve the competition results. This approach is primarily focused in detecting the bona fide class over improving the detection of presentation attack instruments. For the two, three, and four classes scenarios, an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 4.04\%, 0.33\%, and 4,53\% was obtained respectively. Overall, the best serial model proposed, using three scenarios, reached an ERR of 0.33\% with an Attack Presentation Classification Error Rate (APCER) of 0.0100 and a Bona Fide Classification Error Rate (BPCER) of 0.000. This work outperforms the LivDet-Iris 2020 competition results.

Selfie-based biometrics has great potential for a wide range of applications since, e.g. periocular verification is contactless and is safe to use in pandemics such as COVID-19, when a major portion of a face is covered by a facial mask. Despite its advantages, selfie-based biometrics presents challenges since there is limited control over data acquisition at different distances. Therefore, Super-Resolution (SR) has to be used to increase the quality of the eye images and to keep or improve the recognition performance. We propose an Efficient Single Image Super-Resolution algorithm, which takes into account a trade-off between the efficiency and the size of its filters. To that end, the method implements a loss function based on the Sharpness metric used to evaluate iris images quality. Our method drastically reduces the number of parameters compared to the state-of-the-art: from 2,170,142 to 28,654. Our best results on remote verification systems with no redimensioning reached an EER of 8.89\% for FaceNet, 12.14% for VGGFace, and 12.81% for ArcFace. Then, embedding vectors were extracted from SR images, the FaceNet-based system yielded an EER of 8.92% for a resizing of x2, 8.85% for x3, and 9.32% for x4.

Launched in 2013, LivDet-Iris is an international competition series open to academia and industry with the aim to assess and report advances in iris Presentation Attack Detection (PAD). This paper presents results from the fourth competition of the series: LivDet-Iris 2020. This year's competition introduced several novel elements: (a) incorporated new types of attacks (samples displayed on a screen, cadaver eyes and prosthetic eyes), (b) initiated LivDet-Iris as an on-going effort, with a testing protocol available now to everyone via the Biometrics Evaluation and Testing (BEAT)(https://www.idiap.ch/software/beat/) open-source platform to facilitate reproducibility and benchmarking of new algorithms continuously, and (c) performance comparison of the submitted entries with three baseline methods (offered by the University of Notre Dame and Michigan State University), and three open-source iris PAD methods available in the public domain. The best performing entry to the competition reported a weighted average APCER of 59.10\% and a BPCER of 0.46\% over all five attack types. This paper serves as the latest evaluation of iris PAD on a large spectrum of presentation attack instruments., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, Accepted for presentation at International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2020)

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive analysis of periocular-based sex-prediction (commonly referred to as gender classification) using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. In order to reflect a more challenging scenario where periocular images are likely to be obtained from an unknown source, i.e. sensor, convolutional neural networks are trained on fused sets composed of several near-infrared (NIR) and visible wavelength (VW) image databases. In a cross-sensor scenario within each spectrum an average classification accuracy of approximately 85\% is achieved. When sex-prediction is performed across spectra an average classification accuracy of about 82\% is obtained. Finally, a multi-spectral sex-prediction yields a classification accuracy of 83\% on average. Compared to proposed works, obtained results provide a more realistic estimation of the feasibility to predict a subject's sex from the periocular region., Comment: Pre-print version of Paper presented at Proc. International Workshop on Ubiquitous implicit Biometrics and health signals monitoring for person-centric applications (UBIO 18), 2018

Soft biometric information such as gender can contribute to many applications like as identification and security. This paper explores the use of a Binary Statistical Features (BSIF) algorithm for classifying gender from iris texture images captured with NIR sensors. It uses the same pipeline for iris recognition systems consisting of iris segmentation, normalisation and then classification. Experiments show that applying BSIF is not straightforward since it can create artificial textures causing misclassification. In order to overcome this limitation, a new set of filters was trained from eye images and different sized filters with padding bands were tested on a subject-disjoint database. A Modified-BSIF (MBSIF) method was implemented. The latter achieved better gender classification results (94.6\% and 91.33\% for the left and right eye respectively). These results are competitive with the state of the art in gender classification. In an additional contribution, a novel gender labelled database was created and it will be available upon request., Comment: A pre-print version of the paper accepted at 12th IAPR International Conference on Biometrics

Most gender classifications methods from NIR images have used iris information. Recent work has explored the use of the whole periocular iris region which has surprisingly achieve better results. This suggests the most relevant information for gender classification is not located in the iris as expected. In this work, we analyze and demonstrate the location of the most relevant features that describe gender in periocular NIR images and evaluate its influence its classification. Experiments show that the periocular region contains more gender information than the iris region. We extracted several features (intensity, texture, and shape) and classified them according to its relevance using the XgBoost algorithm. Support Vector Machine and nine ensemble classifiers were used for testing gender accuracy when using the most relevant features. The best classification results were obtained when 4,000 features located on the periocular region were used (89.22\%). Additional experiments with the full periocular iris images versus the iris-Occluded images were performed. The gender classification rates obtained were 84.35\% and 85.75\% respectively. We also contribute to the state of the art with a new database (UNAB-Gender). From results, we suggest focussing only on the surrounding area of the iris. This allows us to realize a faster classification of gender from NIR periocular images., Comment: 12 pages, Paper accepted by IET Biometrics

Selfie soft biometrics has great potential for various applications ranging from marketing, security and online banking. However, it faces many challenges since there is limited control in data acquisition conditions. This chapter presents a Super-Resolution-Convolutional Neural Networks (SRCNNs) approach that increases the resolution of low quality periocular iris images cropped from selfie images of subject's faces. This work shows that increasing image resolution (2x and 3x) can improve the sex-classification rate when using a Random Forest classifier. The best sex-classification rate was 90.15% for the right and 87.15% for the left eye. This was achieved when images were upscaled from 150x150 to 450x450 pixels. These results compare well with the state of the art and show that when improving image resolution with the SRCNN the sex-classification rate increases. Additionally, a novel selfie database captured from 150 subjects with an iPhone X was created (available upon request)., Comment: Pre-print version accepted to be published On Selfie Biometrics Book-2019