Can Shadows Reveal Biometric Information?
Safa C. Medin, Amir Weiss, Fr\'edo Durand, William T. Freeman, Gregory, W. Wornell

TL;DR
This paper investigates how shadows can leak biometric information, demonstrating that shadows can be used to reliably infer identities through a novel learning-based approach that leverages synthetic data and domain adaptation.
Contribution
It introduces a new method for biometric inference from shadows using synthetic data and unsupervised domain adaptation, without requiring labeled real data.
Findings
High accuracy in identity classification from shadows
Effective generalization to real-world scenes
Robustness to scene variations
Abstract
We study the problem of extracting biometric information of individuals by looking at shadows of objects cast on diffuse surfaces. We show that the biometric information leakage from shadows can be sufficient for reliable identity inference under representative scenarios via a maximum likelihood analysis. We then develop a learning-based method that demonstrates this phenomenon in real settings, exploiting the subtle cues in the shadows that are the source of the leakage without requiring any labeled real data. In particular, our approach relies on building synthetic scenes composed of 3D face models obtained from a single photograph of each identity. We transfer what we learn from the synthetic data to the real data using domain adaptation in a completely unsupervised way. Our model is able to generalize well to the real domain and is robust to several variations in the scenes. We…
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Videos
Can Shadows Reveal Biometric Information?· youtube
Taxonomy
TopicsFace recognition and analysis · Biometric Identification and Security · Digital Media Forensic Detection
