Soft biometrics: a survey

Bilal Hassan,Ebroul Izquierdo,Tomas Piatrik

doi:10.1007/s11042-021-10622-8

Bilal Hassan, Ebroul Izquierdo + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-10622-8

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Abstract

The field of biometrics research encompasses the need to associate an identity to an individual based on the persons physiological or behaviour traits. While the use of intrusive techniques such as retina scans and finger print identification has resulted in highly accurate systems, the scalability of such systems in real-world applications such as surveillance and border security has been limited. As a branch of biometrics research, the origin of soft biometrics could be traced back to need for non-intrusive solutions for extracting physiological traits of a person. Following high number of research outcomes reported in the literature on soft biometrics, this paper aims to consolidate the scope of soft biometrics research across four thematic schemes (i) a detailed review of soft biometrics research data sets, their annotation strategies and building a largest novel collection of soft traits; (ii) the assessment of metrics that affect the performance of soft biometrics system; (iii) a comparative analysis on feature and modality level fusion reported in the literature for enhancing the system performance; and (iv) a performance analysis of hybrid soft biometrics recognition system using multi-scale criterion. The paper also presents a detailed analysis on the global traits associated to person identity such as gender, age and ethnicity. The contribution of the paper is to provide a comprehensive review of scientific literature, identify open challenges and offer insights on new research directions in the filed.

Highlights

Human body, its behaviours or interactions and any kind of materials or clothing attached to it are rich sources of information for identification
This paper summarizes datasets used in soft biometrics based recognition or retrieval, their volume, subjective and environmental diversity etc. annotation methods and types
We investigated various developed fusion frameworks fully based on soft biometrics modalities and traits ahead

Summary

Introduction

Its behaviours or interactions and any kind of materials or clothing attached to it are rich sources of information for identification These sources of information can be used for features based recognition in surveillance and retrieval of probe from a larger group present in the gallery or database [45, 64, 98, 133]. The set of features used can be either intrusive or non-intrusive or both This survey is focusing on non-intrusive features as they provide seamless recognition and retrieval [119]. Both types of features are categorized as biometrics [29]. The field is still facing several challenges and there are number of gaps that need to be filled before declaring it a replacement for traditional biometrics

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