Soft Biometrics and Gait

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Abstract

With the proliferation of surveillance cameras, society needs means to identify people from the images these cameras provide. Crime solving websites are replete with imagery of criminals who are often disguised and/or at low resolution; terrorist attacks yield more imagery. We noticed this many years ago and were the first to develop systems that aimed to recognise people by their gait, their style of walking. This talk will describe some of the earlier approaches and their motivation, together with the recent works on deep learning. More recently we have moved to recognising people from human descriptions, consistent with eyewitness statements and the limited spatial and temporal resolution of surveillance imagery, and the chance of disguise. We have shown that human descriptions can be used for recognition and retrieval, and formulated ways to make these descriptions more effective. We have so far used descriptions of the face, the body and the clothing, and are our current work shows how the labels can be derived by computer vision and explores the new information available by the interface between semantic description and automated recognition. This talk thus surveys these areas, describing progress in gait and in soft biometrics.

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