Label propagation approach for predicting missing biographic labels in face‐based biometric records

Abstract

A biometric system uses the physical or behavioural attributes of a person, such as face, fingerprint, iris or voice, to recognise an individual. Many operational biometric systems store the biographic information of an individual, viz., name, gender, age and ethnicity, besides the biometric data itself. Thus, the biometric record pertaining to an individual consists of both biometric data and biographic data. We propose the use of a graph structure to model the relationship between the biometric records in a database. We show the benefits of such a graph in deducing biographic labels of incomplete records, i.e. records that may have missing biographic information. In particular, we use a label propagation scheme to deduce missing values for both binary-valued biographic attributes (e.g. gender) as well as multi-valued biographic attributes (e.g. age group). Experimental results using face-based biometric records consisting of name, age, gender and ethnicity convey the pros and cons of the proposed method.