Soft Biometrics

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Abstract

Our research is driven by society's need to identify people from within surveillance video. The prime advantage of gait as a biometric is that it can be used for recognition at a distance whereas other biometrics cannot. There is a rich selection of approaches and many advances have been made, even with use in identification in scene of crime videos, as will be reviewed in this talk. Soft biometrics is an emerging area of interest in biometrics where we augment computer vision derived measures by human descriptions. I shall review other works on soft biometrics before moving to our own research. Applied to gait biometrics, this again can be used where other biometric data is obscured or at too low resolution. The human descriptions are semantic and are a set of labels which are converted into numbers. Naturally, there are considerations of language and psychology when the labels are collected. After describing current progress in gait biometrics, this talk will describe how the soft biometrics labels are collected, and how they can be used to enhance recognising people by the way they walk. As well as reinforcing biometrics, this approach might lead to a new procedure for collecting witness statements, and to the ability to retrieve subjects from video using witness statements.

Biography

Mark S. Nixon is currently a Professor of Computer Vision with the University of Southampton, U.K. His research interests are in image processing and computer vision. His team were early workers in face recognition and later pioneers of gait recognition. He has chaired/program chaired many conferences (BMVC 98, AVBPA ’03, FG ’06, ICPR ’04, ICB ’09/15, and BTAS ’10). He is a member of IAPR TC4 Biometrics, the IEEE Biometrics Council and Fellow of IET, IAPR, and BMVA. His textbook on Feature Extraction and Image Processing for Computer Vision is currently in its Third Edition, published by Academic Press/ Elsevier in 2012. His first book, Introductory Digital Design - a programmable approach , was published by MacMillan, July 1995 and there's a new version Digital Electronics: a Primer, published by Imperial College Press 2015. With Tieniu Tan and Rama Chellappa, he wrote Human ID based on Gait which is part of the Springer Series on Biometrics, and was published late 2005. He recently co-edited the first book on Biometrics Spoofing Handbook of Biometric Anti-Spoofing, with Springer 2014 and its second Edition 2018; We wrote the survey on Gait Biometrics in the first text on Biometrics: Personal ID in Networked Society, and the Ear Biometrics Chapter in The Handbook of Biometrics. He’s written a heck of a lot of papers and supervised a heck of a lot of (great) PhD students.

Mark Nixon
University of Southampton, UK