Ocular Biometrics Recognition by Analyzing Human Exploration during Video Observations

Dario Cazzato,Claudio Cimarelli,Cosimo Distante,Holger Voos,Marco Leo,Pierluigi Carcagnì

doi:10.3390/app10134548

Dario Cazzato, Claudio Cimarelli + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/app10134548

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Abstract

Soft biometrics provide information about the individual but without the distinctiveness and permanence able to discriminate between any two individuals. Since the gaze represents one of the most investigated human traits, works evaluating the feasibility of considering it as a possible additional soft biometric trait have been recently appeared in the literature. Unfortunately, there is a lack of systematic studies on clinically approved stimuli to provide evidence of the correlation between exploratory paths and individual identities in “natural” scenarios (without calibration, imposed constraints, wearable tools). To overcome these drawbacks, this paper analyzes gaze patterns by using a computer vision based pipeline in order to prove the correlation between visual exploration and user identity. This correlation is robustly computed in a free exploration scenario, not biased by wearable devices nor constrained to a prior personalized calibration. Provided stimuli have been designed by clinical experts and then they allow better analysis of human exploration behaviors. In addition, the paper introduces a novel public dataset that provides, for the first time, images framing the faces of the involved subjects instead of only their gaze tracks.

Highlights

Biometrics encompasses the science of measuring individual body characteristics in order to distinguish a person among many others
It is the first dataset that directly provides images framing the faces of the involved subjects instead of their gaze tracks extracted by an eye tracker
Since works in the state of the art that proposed gaze as soft biometrics employed a professional eye tracker, the first experimental phase aims at evaluating the capability of the proposed pipeline to get gaze information suitable for the task under consideration

Summary

Introduction

Biometrics encompasses the science of measuring individual body characteristics in order to distinguish a person among many others (hard biometrics). Soft biometrics are defined in terms of characteristics that provide information about the individual but without the distinctiveness and permanence able to discriminate between any two individuals [3]. These traits present stronger invariance [5] and they can be often extracted without requiring subject cooperation and from low-quality data [6]. They can complement and strengthen hard primary biometric identifiers, since are established and time-proven by humans in order to differentiate their peers; as a consequence, one of the most successful and investigated solution is to strengthen classic biometric identification schemes [7,8,9]

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