Attribute-Based Deep Periocular Recognition: Leveraging Soft Biometrics to Improve Periocular Recognition

TL;DR

This paper introduces a deep learning framework that predicts soft biometrics from periocular images and fuses this information with periocular features to enhance biometric recognition accuracy in challenging environments.

Contribution

It proposes an end-to-end CNN-based method that jointly predicts soft biometrics and periocular identity, improving recognition performance over existing approaches.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in wild environments

Effective fusion of soft biometrics with periocular features

Validated on four public datasets

Abstract

In recent years, periocular recognition has been developed as a valuable biometric identification approach, especially in wild environments (for example, masked faces due to COVID-19 pandemic) where facial recognition may not be applicable. This paper presents a new deep periocular recognition framework called attribute-based deep periocular recognition (ADPR), which predicts soft biometrics and incorporates the prediction into a periocular recognition algorithm to determine identity from periocular images with high accuracy. We propose an end-to-end framework, which uses several shared convolutional neural network (CNN)layers (a common network) whose output feeds two separate dedicated branches (modality dedicated layers); the first branch classifies periocular images while the second branch predicts softn biometrics. Next, the features from these two branches are fused together for a final periocular recognition. The proposed method is different from existing methods as it not only uses a shared CNN feature space to train these two tasks jointly, but it also fuses predicted soft biometric features with the periocular features in the training step to improve the overall periocular recognition performance. Our proposed model is extensively evaluated using four different publicly available datasets. Experimental results indicate that our soft biometric based periocular recognition approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for periocular recognition in wild environments.