skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Biometric Performance as a Function of Gallery Size
Many developers of biometric systems start with modest samples before general deployment. However, they are interested in how their systems will work with much larger samples. To assist them, we evaluated the effect of gallery size on biometric performance. Identification rates describe the performance of biometric identification, whereas ROC-based measures describe the performance of biometric authentication (verification). Therefore, we examined how increases in gallery size affected identification rates (i.e., Rank-1 Identification Rate, or Rank-1 IR) and ROC-based measures such as equal error rate (EER). We studied these phenomena with synthetic data as well as real data from a face recognition study. It is well known that the Rank-1 IR declines with increasing gallery size, and that the relationship is linear against log(gallery size). We have confirmed this with synthetic and real data. We have shown that this decline can be counteracted with the inclusion of additional information (features) for larger gallery sizes. We have also described the curves which can be used to predict how much additional information would be required to stabilize the Rank-1 IR as a function of gallery size. These equations are also linear in log(gallery size). We have also shown that the entire ROC-curve was not systematically affected by gallery size, and so ROC-based scalar performance metrics such as EER are also stable across gallery size. Unsurprisingly, as additional uncorrelated features are added to the model, EER decreases. We were interested in determining the impact of adding more features on the median, spread and shape of similarity score distributions. We present evidence that these decreases in EER are driven primarily by decreases in the spread of the impostor similarity score distribution.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1714623
PAR ID:
10393871
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Applied Sciences
Volume:
12
Issue:
21
ISSN:
2076-3417
Page Range / eLocation ID:
11144
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. null (Ed.)
    It is generally accepted that relatively more permanent (i.e., more temporally persistent) traits are more valuable for biometric performance than less permanent traits. Although this finding is intuitive, there is no current work identifying exactly where in the biometric analysis temporal persistence makes a difference. In this paper, we answer this question. In a recent report, we introduced the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) as an index of temporal persistence for such features. Here, we present a novel approach using synthetic features to study which aspects of a biometric identification study are influenced by the temporal persistence of features. What we show is that using more temporally persistent features produces effects on the similarity score distributions that explain why this quality is so key to biometric performance. The results identified with the synthetic data are largely reinforced by an analysis of two datasets, one based on eye-movements and one based on gait. There was one difference between the synthetic and real data, related to the intercorrelation of features in real data. Removing these intercorrelations for real datasets with a decorrelation step produced results which were very similar to that obtained with synthetic features. 
    more » « less
  2. null (Ed.)
    A face identification system compares an unknown input probe image to a gallery of labeled face images in order to determine the identity of the probe image. The result of identification is a ranked match list with the most similar gallery face image at the top (rank 1) and the least similar gallery face image at the bottom. In many systems, the top ranked gallery images may look very similar to the probe image as well as to each other and can sometimes result in the misidentification of the probe image. Such similar looking faces pertaining to different identities are referred to as lookalike faces. We hypothesize that a matcher specifically trained to disambiguate lookalike face images when combined with a regular face matcher will improve overall identification performance. This work proposes reranking the initial ranked match list using a disambiguator especially for lookalike face pairs. This work also evaluates schemes to select gallery images in the initial ranked match list that should be re- ranked. Experiments on the challenging TinyFace dataset shows that the proposed approach improves the closed-set identification accuracy of a state-of-the-art face matcher. 
    more » « less
  3. Deep learning models have demonstrated significant advantages over traditional algorithms in image processing tasks like object detection. However, a large amount of data are needed to train such deep networks, which limits their application to tasks such as biometric recognition that require more training samples for each class (i.e., each individual). Researchers developing such complex systems rely on real biometric data, which raises privacy concerns and is restricted by the availability of extensive, varied datasets. This paper proposes a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based solution to produce training data (palm images) for improved biometric (palmprint-based) recognition systems. We investigate the performance of the most recent StyleGAN models in generating a thorough contactless palm image dataset for application in biometric research. Training on publicly available H-PolyU and IIDT palmprint databases, a total of 4839 images were generated using StyleGAN models. SIFT (Scale-Invariant Feature Transform) was used to find uniqueness and features at different sizes and angles, which showed a similarity score of 16.12% with the most recent StyleGAN3-based model. For the regions of interest (ROIs) in both the palm and finger, the average similarity scores were 17.85%. We present the Frechet Inception Distance (FID) of the proposed model, which achieved a 16.1 score, demonstrating significant performance. These results demonstrated StyleGAN as effective in producing unique synthetic biometric images. 
    more » « less
  4. Non-invasive, efficient, physical token-less, accurate and stable identification methods for newborns may prevent baby swapping at birth, limit baby abductions and improve post-natal health monitoring across geographies, within the context of both the formal (i.e., hospitals) and informal (i.e., humanitarian and fragile settings) health sectors. This paper explores the feasibility of application iris recognition to build biometric identifiers for 4-6 week old infants. We (a) collected near infrared (NIR) iris images from 17 infants using a specially-designed NIR iris sensor; (b) evaluated six iris recognition methods to assess readiness of the state-of-the-art iris recognition to be applied to newborns and infants; (c) proposed a new segmentation model that correctly detects iris texture within infants iris images, and coupled it with several iris texture encoding approaches to offer, to the first of our knowledge, a fully-operational infant iris recognition system; and, (d) trained a StyleGAN-based model to synthesize iris images mimicking samples acquired from infants to deliver to the research community privacy-safe in- fant iris images. The proposed system, incorporating the specially-designed iris sensor and segmenter, and applied to the collected infant iris samples, achieved Equal Error Rate (EER) of 3% and Area Under ROC Curve (AUC) of 99%, compared to EER20% and AUC88% obtained for state of the art adult iris recognition systems. This suggests that it may be feasible to design methods that succesfully extract biometric features from infant irises. 
    more » « less
  5. Accuracy in the prediction of protein structures is key in understanding the biological functions of different proteins. Numerous measures of similarity tools for protein structures have been developed over the years, and these include Root Mean Square Deviation (RMSD), as well as Template Modeling Score (TM-score). While RMSD is influenced by the length of the protein and therefore the similarity between superimposed models can be affected by divergent loops in the models, TM-score is rather a robust and a more accurate method. TM-score, however, is much slower than RMSD in terms of calculations for the optimal superimposed model. Here, we present initial optimization work on GPU-TM-score, a GPU accelerated Template Modeling Score for fast and accurate measuring of similarity between protein structures. Our optimization is based on OpenACC parallelization and performance analysis of bottleneck regions and the KABSCH algorithm for the calculation of optimal superimposition within parallel architectures. Our initial results indicate an average 3.14× speedup compared to original TM-score on a benchmark set of 20 protein structures. This speedup is recorded on an Nvidia Volta V100 GPU compared to an AMD EPYC 7742 64-core processor. 
    more » « less