Blockchain Technology in Biometric Database System

Traditional biometric systems are designed and configured to operate in predefined circumstances to address the needs of a particular application. The performance of such biometrics systems tend to decrease because when they encounter varying conditions as they are unable to adapt to such variations. Many real-life scenarios require identification systems to recognise uncooperative people in uncontrolled environments. Therefore, there is a real need to design biometric systems that are aware of their context and be able to adapt to changing conditions. The context-awareness and adaptation of a biometric system are based on a set of factors that include: the application (e.g. healthcare system, border control, unlock smart devices), environment (e.g. quiet/noisy, indoor/outdoor), desired and pre-defined requirements (e.g. speed, usability, reliability, accuracy, robustness to high/low quality samples), user of the system (e.g. cooperative or non-cooperative), the chosen modality (e.g. face, speech, gesture signature), and used techniques (e.g. pre-processing to normalise and clean biometrics data, feature extraction and classification). These factors are linked and might affect each other, hence the system has to work adaptively to meet its overall aim based to its operational context. The aim of this research is to develop a multiagent based framework to represent a context-aware adaptive biometric system. This is to improve the decision making process at each processing step of traditional biometric identification systems. Agents will be used to provide the system with intelligence, adaptation, flexibility, automation, and reliability during the identification process. The framework will accommodate at least five agents, one for each of the five main processing steps of a typical biometric system (i.e. data capture, pre-processing, feature extraction, classification and decision). Each agent can contribute differently towards its designated goal to achieve the best possible solution by selecting/ applying the best technique. For example, an agent can be used to assess the quality of the input biometric sample to ensure the important features can be extracted and processed in further steps. Another agent can be used to pre-process the biometric sample if necessary. A third agent is used to select the appropriate set of features followed by another to select a suitable classifier that works well in a given condition.

With the use of computers and Internet in every major activity of our society, security is increasingly important. Biometric recognition is not only challenging but also computationally demanding. This chapter aims develop an iris biometric system. The iris has the advantages of uniqueness, stableness, anti-spoof, non-invasiveness and efficiency and could be applied in almost every area (banking, forensics, access control, etc.). The performance of a biometric classification system is largely depending on the techniques used for feature extraction. Inspired by the biological plausibility of ordinal measures, we propose their employment for iris representation and recognition. Qualitative measurement, associated to the relative ordering of different characteristics, is defined as ordinal measurement. Besides the proposing of a novel, fast and robust, ordinal based feature extraction method, the chapter also considers the problem of designing the decision making model so as to obtain an efficient and effective biometric system. In the literature, there are different approaches for iris recognition, nevertheless, there are still challenging open problems in improving the accuracy, robustness, security and ergonomics of biometric systems.

There is insufficient consideration of Generation Z’s cultural and generational needs in the implementation of biometric attendance systems in Arabic educational settings. This study delves into Generation Z’s discipline, exploring their perspectives on attendance systems and aligning commitment with their interests. The primary aim is to gauge biometric systems’ impact on productivity. Google Form questionnaires collected data from young employees, ages 25 to 35, who belong to Generation Z’s working in the higher education system. Structural equation modeling and descriptive analysis assessed the data. While biometric systems enhance discipline, they may dampen morale. Implementing systems fairly and maintaining flexibility is vital. The study underscores the importance of evaluating employees based on achievements. It sheds light on biometric systems’ role in attendance management and organizational performance, aiding HR practices. The results showed no significant effect of Employee Management Practices (EMP) on organization performance through Biometric Attendance Technology (BAT) (B = 0.049, t = 1.330, p = 0.184). Nor significant effects of Organizational Performance Metrics (OPM) (B = 0.019, t = 0.608, p = 0.543). Technological Infrastructure (TI) (B = 0.019, t = 0.2461, p = 0.645), or Satisfaction and Engagement (ESE) (B = 0.057, t = 1.381, p = 0.167) on organization performance through Biometric Attendance Technology. The mediator impact was also found to be not significant (P > 0.05). Therefore, both direct and specific indirect effects were not significant. Indicating that Biometric Attendance Technology does not mediate the relationship between these variables and organizational performance.

Multimodal biometrics-based systems aim to improve the recognition accuracy of human beings using more than one physical and/or behavioral characteristics of a person. In this paper, different fusion schemes at matching score level and feature level are employed to obtain a robust recognition system using several standard feature extractors. The proposed method involves the consideration of a face–iris multimodal biometric system using score level and feature level fusion. Principal Component Analysis (PCA), subspace Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), subpattern-based PCA, modular PCA and Local Binary Patterns (LBP) are global and local feature extraction methods applied on face and iris images. In fact, different feature sets obtained from five local and global feature extraction methods for unimodal iris biometric system are concatenated at feature level fusion called iris feature vector fusion (iris-FVF), while for unimodal face biometric system, LBP is used to achieve efficient texture descriptors. Feature selection is performed using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) at feature level fusion step to reduce the dimension of feature vectors for improving the recognition performance. Our proposed method is validated by forming three datasets using ORL, BANCA, FERET face databases and CASIA, UBIRIS iris databases. The results based on recognition performance and ROC analysis demonstrate that the proposed matching score level fusion scheme using Weighted Sum rule, tanh normalization, iris-FVF and facial features extracted by LBP achieves a significant improvement over unimodal and multimodal methods. Support Vector Machine (SVM) and t-norm normalization are also used to improve the recognition performance of the proposed method.

In the field of data security, biometric security is a significant emerging concern. The multimodal biometrics system with enhanced accuracy and detection rate for smart environments is still a significant challenge. The fusion of an electrocardiogram (ECG) signal with a fingerprint is an effective multimodal recognition system. In this work, unimodal and multimodal biometric systems using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) are conducted and compared with traditional methods using different levels of fusion of fingerprint and ECG signal. This study is concerned with the evaluation of the effectiveness of proposed parallel and sequential multimodal biometric systems with various feature extraction and classification methods. Additionally, the performance of unimodal biometrics of ECG and fingerprint utilizing deep learning and traditional classification technique is examined. The suggested biometric systems were evaluated utilizing ECG (MIT-BIH) and fingerprint (FVC2004) databases. Additional tests are conducted to examine the suggested models with:1) virtual dataset without augmentation (ODB) and 2) virtual dataset with augmentation (VDB). The findings show that the optimum performance of the parallel multimodal achieved 0.96 Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) and sequential multimodal achieved 0.99 AUC, in comparison to unimodal biometrics which achieved 0.87 and 0.99 AUCs, for the fingerprint and ECG biometrics, respectively. The overall performance of the proposed multimodal biometrics outperformed unimodal biometrics using CNN. Moreover, the performance of the suggested CNN model for ECG signal and sequential multimodal system based on neural network outperformed other systems. Lastly, the performance of the proposed systems is compared with previously existing works.

Empowering robust biometric authentication: The fusion of deep learning and security image analysis

A biometric system is an amalgamation of algorithms that uses an individual’s unique biological data innate physical features (fingerprints, retina, face, ears, etc.) or behavioural features (signature, voice, keystroke dynamics, etc.) or both to authenticate the individual. This essentially makes a biometric system function as a pattern recognition system that helps an individual in any kind of adversarial environment. Hence, like any conventional authentication system, it is vulnerable to the attacks of malicious adversaries that try to manipulate the data and thus decline the security of the system by compromising its robustness. These possible attacks have not been considered while developing most biometric authentication systems. Our work describes multimodal biometrics, its feature extraction methods, research challenges and focuses on the major security issues in both unimodal and multimodal biometric systems. This paper summarizes some robust multimodal systems, their countermeasures and algorithms that have been devised to tackle these security challenges.KeywordsBiometricsMultimodal biometricsBiometric fusionSecurityAttacksCountermeasuresEncryption

In the field of image processing, a piece of information can be defined as a feature, which can be utilised to determine the computational task with references to some applications. Features may refer to specific structures in the images such as points, edges or objects. Feature detection and feature description are the initial steps of image registration process. There are many algorithms of feature detection like BRISK, FAST, SURF, etc. In our earlier paper [15], a hybrid algorithm for feature detection and feature description has been proposed. The next step of image registration is feature matching. This paper deals with feature matching algorithm using BRISK [4], FAST [3] and hybrid [15]. The proposed hybrid algorithm performs better results than the above two existing algorithms in terms of elapsed time, CPU time and performance measuring time. This can be clearly concluded that the feature matching result of hybrid in terms of tables and figures performs well. For testing the algorithm, river dam images of Odisha are chosen.

As the security system in society increases, vein recognition has become an authentic method for biometrics-based identification systems. Biometrics is a field of statistical analysis of the biological characteristics of an individual. Here, the dorsal hand vein is used for biometric identification. The dorsal hand vein biometric system is one of the emerging biometric technologies to determine or authenticate the identity of an individual. In the proposed method, the input dorsal hand vein image is first preprocessed to remove unwanted noises. The feature, which is directional information about vein, is extracted from the preprocessed image using an extended version of Local Binary Pattern (LBP) called the orientation of LBP (OLBP). The feature extracted using OLBP is represented in binary format so that the matching of features can be carried out by a Hamming distance. The proposed method tested with a standard database from the University of Cairo’s Department of Biomedical and Systems Engineering. The results show that the suggested method gives good performance with 98.4% of Correct Recognition Rate, 0.07 of False Rejection Rate, and 0.08 of False Acceptance Rate and it is suitable for the biometric recognition system. An efficient method for dorsal hand vein biometric recognition is developed using OLBP. The comparison with other methods produced results that reveal the supremacy of the proposed algorithm for biometric recognition.

This paper proposes a fuzzy logic based edge detector for feature extraction in biometric systems such as face and palm print recognition. Edge detection is carried out by means of global (histogram of gray levels) and local (pixels within in a window) information. The local information is fuzzified by employing a modified Gaussian membership function. Using the contrast intensification operator, the image is enhanced to the required level of visual quality by entropy optimization of fuzzification parameters. Furthermore, the local edge detection operator is applied on the enhanced image using parameters obtained from entropy optimization. Finally, a simple threshold is applied to produce the skeleton image. Results demonstrate that this edge detector is well suited for feature extraction in biometric image systems.

To solve the low accuracy of image feature matching in horticultural robot visual navigation, an innovative and effective image feature matching algorithm was proposed combining the improved Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) and Lucas–Kanade (LK) optical flow algorithm. First, image feature points were extracted according to the adaptive threshold calculated using the Michelson contrast. Then, the extracted feature points were uniformed by the quadtree structure, which can reduce the calculated amount of feature matching, and the uniform ORB feature points were roughly matched to estimate the position of the feature points in the matched image using the improved LK optical flow. Finally, the Hamming distance between rough matching points was calculated for precise matching. Feature extraction and matching experiments were performed in four typical scenes: normal light, low light, high texture, and low texture. Compared with the traditional algorithm, the uniformity and accuracy of the feature points extracted by the proposed algorithm were enhanced by 0.22 and 50.47%, respectively. Meanwhile, the results revealed that the matching accuracy of the proposed algorithm increased by 14.59%, whereas the matching time and total time decreased by 39.18% and 44.79%, respectively. The proposed algorithm shows great potential for application in the visual simultaneous localization and mapping (V-SLAM) of horticultural robots to achieve higher accuracy of real-time positioning and map construction.

During the continual transitions from lab research to real-world applications of vision-based algorithms, there are significant challenges, e.g. the robustness to adapt to complex environments and the high demands of multi-task, multi-modal learning models. More specifically on visual simultaneous localization and mapping (visual SLAM) for mobile robots, two notable limitations are: (i) the drift issue during pose estimation, especially in dynamic environments, makes the positioning system unstable; (ii) the additional loop detection takes many computational resources for image retrieval and global feature geometry checking. This thesis explores the approaches of visual localization on unmanned ground vehicles by solving those limitations. The conventional feature extraction and matching pipeline for vision-based tasks involve three steps: (i) local feature detection and description, (ii) feature matching, and (iii) outlier rejection. The first contribution of the thesis is adding a feature selection and anticipation stage to reduce tracking drift. We explore the noise model of image features to select a subset of all the observed image features with the best ”contribution” during data association and pose estimation across multiple frames. Conventional SLAM algorithms take a strong assumption of scene rigidity, which limits the application under challenging environments. The second part of the thesis addresses the tough issue in dynamic environments with moving objects. We presented GMC, namely the motion clustering approach, a lightweight dynamic object filtering method. It can distinguish moving objects from static landmarks. Based on the theory of motion coherence within a particular image area, GMC could segment dynamic objects in 3D space. We can provide an efficient and robust correspondence algorithm that can extract dynamic objects from a static background with the method. In this way, we propose a dynamic SLAM system that is real-time and free from expensive GPU processors. In contrast to GMC, the thesis’s third part turns to an object-aware learning-based model for more general dynamic scenarios. We use object detection and tracking as points, lines, planes, etc. We utilize semantic information and extract sparse image features simultaneously to keep track of dynamic objects. The static background and different dynamic objects are jointly optimized in a newly developed bundle adjustment sliding window. The estimated 3D bounding boxes can provide more robust camera tracking and better scene understanding, and better map merging. The fourth part of the thesis leverages the emerging feature learning framework. It proposes a unified self-supervised model called LGDNet to generate both global and local image feature descriptors end-to-end. Global feature descriptors embed the whole image into a compact representation, leading to easier scene comparison. On the other hand, local features focus more on the local region similarities of some salient parts for structure from motion. Our proposed method can directly extract features together with descriptors that encode both local maximum responses and global context information, avoiding duplicate calculations based on different feature extraction criteria.

Identity verification systems that use a mono modal biometric always have to contend with sensor noise and limitations of the feature extractor and matcher, while combining information from different biometrics modalities may well provide higher and more consistent performance levels. However, an intelligent scheme is required to fuse the decisions produced by the individual sensors. This paper presents a decision fusion technique for a bimodal biometric verification system that makes use of facial and speech biometrics. The decision fusion schemes considered have simple Bayesian structures (SBS) that particularize the univariat Gaussian density function, Beta density function or Parzen window density estimation. SBS has advantages in terms of computation speed, storage space and its open framework. The performances of SBS is evaluated and compared with that of other classical classification approaches, such as sum rule and Multilayer Perceptron, on a bimodal database.

Systemic inequity in biometrics systems based on racial and gender disparities has received a lot of attention recently. These disparities have been explored in existing biometrics systems such as facial biometrics (identifying individuals based on facial attributes). However, such ethical issues remain largely unexplored in voice biometric systems that are very popular and extensively used globally. Using a corpus of non-speech voice records featuring a diverse group of 300 speakers by race (75 each from White, Black, Asian, and Latinx subgroups) and gender (150 each from female and male subgroups), we explore and reveal that racial subgroup has a similar voice characteristic and gender subgroup has a significant different voice characteristic. Moreover, non-negligible racial and gender disparities exist in speaker identification accuracy by analyzing the performance of one commercial product and five research products. The average accuracy for Latinxs can be 12% lower than Whites (p < 0.05, 95% CI 1.58%, 14.15%) and can be significantly higher for female speakers than males (3.67% higher, p < 0.05, 95% CI 1.23%, 11.57%). We further discover that racial disparities primarily result from the neural network-based feature extraction within the voice biometric product and gender disparities primarily due to both voice inherent characteristic difference and neural network-based feature extraction. Finally, we point out strategies (e.g., feature extraction optimization) to incorporate fairness and inclusive consideration in biometrics technology.

A review is conducted to deeply analyse and map the research landscape of current technologies in finger vein (FV) biometric authentication in medical systems into a coherent taxonomy. This research focuses on articles related to the keywords `biometrics', `finger veins' and `verification' and their variations in three major databases, namely, Web of Science, ScienceDirect and IEEE Xplore. The final set of collected articles related to FV biometric authentication systems is divided into software- and hardware-based systems. In the first category, software development attempts are described. The experiment results, frameworks, algorithms and methods that perform satisfactorily are presented. Moreover, the experiences obtained from conducting these studies are discussed. In the second category, hardware development attempts are described. The final articles are discussed from three aspects, namely, (1) number of publications, (2) problem type, proposed solutions, best results and evaluation methods in the included studies and (3) available databases containing different scientific work collected from volunteers, such as staff and students. The basic characteristics of this emerging field are identified from the following aspects: motivations of using FV biometric technology in authentication systems, open challenges that impede the technology's utility, authors' recommendations and future research prospects. A new solution is proposed to address several issues, such as leakage of biometrics that leads to serious risks due to the use of stolen FV templates and various spoofing and brute-force attacks in decentralised network architectures in medical systems, including access points and various database nodes without a central point. This work contributes to literature by providing a detailed review of feasible alternatives and research gaps, thereby enabling researchers and developers to develop FV biometric authentication medical systems further. Insights into the importance of such a technology and its integration into different medical applications and fields are also provided.