Using Phase and Directional Line Features for Efficient Palmprint Authentication

A palm, a large inner surface of a hand, contains pattern of ridges and valleys much like a fingerprint. The palmprint is expected to be more distinctive than the fingerprint, since the area of the palm is much larger than that of the finger and the palm has additional distinctive features such as principle lines, ridges, minutiae points, singular points and texture. This paper presents a palmprint recognition algorithm using phase-based image matching. The use of the phase components in 2D (two-dimensional) discrete Fourier transforms of palmprint images makes possible to achieve highly robust palmprint recognition. Experimental evaluation using palmprint images clearly demonstrates an efficient matching performance of the proposed algorithm.

Palmprint recognition is gaining grounds as a biometric system for forensic and commercial applications. Palmprint recognition addressed the recognition issue using low and high resolution images. This paper uses PolyU hyperspectral palmprint database, and applies back-propagation neural network for recognition, linear discriminate analysis for dimensionality reduction, and 2D discrete wavelet, ridgelet, curvelet, and contourlet for feature extraction. The recognition rate accuracy shows that contourlet outperforms other transforms.

Image super-resolution is of great interest in medical imaging field. However, different from natural images studied in computer vision field, the low-resolution (LR) medical imaging data is often a stack of high-resolution (HR) 2D slices with large slice thickness. Consequently, the goal of super-resolution for medical imaging data is to reconstruct the missing slice(s) between any two consecutive slices. Since some modalities (e.g., T1-weighted MR image) are often acquired with high-resolution (HR) image, it is intuitive to harness the prior self-similarity information in the HR image for guiding the super-resolution of LR image (e.g., T2-weighted MR image). The conventional way is to find the profile of patchwise self-similarity in the HR image and then use it to reconstruct the missing information at the same location of LR image. However, the local morphological patterns could vary significantly across the LR and HR images, due to the use of different imaging protocols. Therefore, such direct (un-supervised) adaption of self-similarity profile from HR image is often not effective in revealing the actual information in the LR image. To this end, we propose to employ the existing image information in the LR image to supervise the estimation of self-similarity profile by requiring it not only being optimal in representing patches in the HR image, but also producing less reconstruction errors for the existing image information in the LR image. Moreover, to make the anatomical structures spatially consistent in the reconstructed image, we simultaneously estimate the self-similarity profiles for a stack of patches across consecutive slices by solving a group sparse patch representation problem. We have evaluated our proposed super-resolution method on both simulated brain MR images and real patient images with multiple sclerosis lesion, achieving promising results with more anatomical details and sharpness.

Learning based single image super-resolution (SISR) for real-world images has been an active research topic yet a challenging task, due to the lack of paired low-resolution (LR) and high-resolution (HR) training images. Most of the existing unsupervised real-world SISR methods adopt a two-stage training strategy by synthesizing realistic LR images from their HR counterparts first, then training the super-resolution (SR) models in a supervised manner. However, the training of image degradation and SR models in this strategy are separate, ignoring the inherent mutual dependency between downscaling and its inverse upscaling process. Additionally, the ill-posed nature of image degradation is not fully considered. In this paper, we propose an image downscaling and SR model dubbed as SDFlow, which simultaneously learns a bidirectional many-to-many mapping between real-world LR and HR images unsupervisedly. The main idea of SDFlow is to decouple image content and degradation information in the latent space, where content information distribution of LR and HR images is matched in a common latent space. Degradation information of the LR images and the high-frequency information of the HR images are fitted to an easy-to-sample conditional distribution. Experimental results on real-world image SR datasets indicate that SDFlow can generate diverse realistic LR and SR images both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Cross-Resolution Person Re-Identification (re-ID) aims to match images with disparate resolutions arising from variations in camera hardware and shooting distances. Most conventional works utilize Super-Resolution (SR) models to recover Low Resolution (LR) images to High Resolution (HR) images. However, because the SR models cannot completely compensate for the missing information in the LR images, there is still a large gap between the HR image recovered from the LR images and the real HR images. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel Multi-Scale Image- and Feature-Level Alignment (MSIFLA) framework to align the images on multiple resolution scales at both the image and feature level. Specifically, (i) we design a Cascaded Multi-Scale Resolution Reconstruction (CMSR2) module, which is composed of three cascaded Image Reconstruction (IR) networks, and can continuously reconstruct multiple variables of different resolution scales from low to high for each image, regardless of image resolution. The reconstructed images with specific resolution scales are of similar distribution; therefore, the images are aligned on multiple resolution scales at the image level. (ii) We propose a Multi-Resolution Representation Learning (MR2L) module which consists of three-person re-ID networks to encourage the IR models to preserve the ID-discriminative information during training separately. Each re-ID network focuses on mining discriminative information from a specific scale without the disturbance from various resolutions. By matching the extracted features on three resolution scales, the images with different resolutions are also aligned at the feature-level. We conduct extensive experiments on multiple public cross-resolution person re-ID datasets to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. In addition, the generalization of MSIFLA in handling cross-resolution retrieval tasks is verified on the UAV vehicle dataset.

In this paper, we demonstrate simple algorithms that project low resolution (LR) images differing in subpixel shifts on a high resolution (HR) also called super resolution (SR) grid. The algorithms are very effective in accuracy as well as time efficiency. A number of spatial interpolation techniques using nearest neighbor, inverse-distance weighted averages, Radial Basis Functions (RBF) etc. are used in projection. For best accuracy of reconstructing SR image by a factor of two requires four LR images differing in four independent subpixel shifts. The algorithm has two steps: i) registration of low resolution images and (ii) shifting the low resolution images to align with reference image and projecting them on high resolution grid based on the shifts of each low resolution image using different interpolation techniques. Experiments are conducted by simulating low resolution images by subpixel shifts and subsampling of original high resolution image and the reconstructing the high resolution images from the simulated low resolution images. The results of accuracy of reconstruction are compared by using mean squared error measure between original high resolution image and reconstructed image. The algorithm was tested on remote sensing images and found to outperform previously proposed techniques such as Iterative Back Projection algorithm (IBP), Maximum Likelihood (ML) algorithms. The algorithms are robust and are not overly sensitive to the registration inaccuracies.

This paper presents a work about palm print recognition using fuzzy entropy. A number of schemes have been proposed to combine the fuzzy set theory and its application to the entropy concept for modelling a palm print recognition system. The measure of uncertainty is adopted as a measure of information. Hence, the measures of fuzziness are known as fuzzy information measures. The measure of information is used to measure the uncertainty. Hence, fuzzy information measures are used to measure the fuzziness. The measure of a quantity of fuzzy information obtained from a fuzzy set or fuzzy system is known as fuzzy entropy. Since no probabilistic concept is needed to define fuzzy entropy, classical Shannon entropy is quite different from it. Further, Shannon entropy contains the randomness uncertainty (probabilistic) whereas fuzzy entropy contains vagueness and ambiguity uncertainties. The concept of membership function is used to define fuzzy entropy. The properties of fuzzy entropy have become popular and are being used very frequently to define any new fuzzy entropy. The fuzzy entropy function used in this paper is defined using the new random membership function μ. Previous works in palm print recognition use standard methods for feature extraction. By using standard techniques, the recognition rate was not as expected. Incorporating fuzzy concept to derive the features of palm print is the motivation for this work. The proposed work uses fuzzy membership function to extract the maximum information out of palm print as it contains lot of uncertainties. The fuzzy membership function developed in the proposed work is applied in the fuzzy entropy function to generate the new entropy information features which when tested with the standard classifier using support vector machine gives the encouraging result in terms of recognition rate. The proposed work was done using COEP (College of Engineering, Pune) database. It can be noted that palm print recognition is an important modality in biometrics for security purposes, as its use in practical life cannot be avoided. The palm print image contains lot of undefined and vague information and the best method to take out the maximum information out of the palm print image is the use of fuzzy logic concepts. This feature also motivated us for the proposed work.

Palmprint recognition provides a potential solution for noninvasive personal authentication due to its excellent contactless property and user-security, and it has attracted tremendous research interest in recent years. However, most existing methods focus on intraspectral palmprint recognition, which requires gallery and probe images to be captured under similar illumination, and thus significantly limit its practical applications in open environments with variant illuminations. In this study, we present a spectrum-invariant feature learning method for cross-spectral palmprint recognition to address the problem that gallery and probe samples are captured under different spectra. First, the blockwise direction-based ordinal measure vectors are formed to represent the intrinsic information of palmprint images. Then, a unified feature projection is jointly learned to map two different spectra of palmprint images into a common feature space, in which the different spectral features have enhanced discriminative power by enlarging their variances while the intraclass features learned from different spectral images are similar. The proposed method can be easily extended to seek the unified spectrum-invariant representation of multiple spectral palmprint images, making it feasible to perform palmprint recognition crossing one spectrum to multiple spectra. Experimental results on two multispectral palmprint image databases demonstrate the promising effectiveness of the proposed method on cross-spectral palmprint recognition.

Image super-resolution (SR) can be seen as finding a nonlinear mapping between low-resolution (LR) image and high-resolution (HR) image. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) based image SR methods have achieved great success based on features extracted from pretrained networks. However, the previous works less consider multiscale features. In this paper, we propose a SR cascaded multi-column convolutional neural network (SRCMCN) to recover HR image by learning multi-scale features from the corresponding LR image. Compared to existing CNN based image SR methods, the proposed method directly takes the original LR image as input to learn the residual between interpolated LR image and corresponding HR image, which will reduce the computational cost of convolution due to the small input size. Besides, in order to achieve high-quality reconstruction, we optimize our networks using mean absolute error (MAE) loss function. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art image SR methods in terms of both reconstructed image quality and computational efficiency.

Single image super-resolution based on compressive sensing and improved TV minimization sparse recovery

Existing single image super-resolution (SISR) methods usually focus on Low-Resolution (LR) images which are artificially generated from High-Resolution (HR) images by a down-sampling process, but are not robust for unmatched training set and testing set. This paper proposes a GAN Flexible Lmser (GFLmser) network that bidirectionally learns the High-to-Low (H2L) process that degrades HR images to LR images and the Low-to-High (L2H) process that recovers the LR images back to HR images. The two directions share the same architecture, added with the gated skip connections from the H2L-net to the L2H-net in order to enhance information transferring for super-resolution. In comparison with several related state-of-the-art methods, experiments demonstrate that not only GFLmser is the most robust method on images of unmatched training set and testing set, but also its performance on real-world face LR images is best in PSNR and reasonably good in FID.

Image upscaling aims to increase the resolution and size of a low resolution (LR) image in order to generate a high resolution (HR) image of high frequency (HF). There are several polynomial methods for obtaining a sharpened, upscaled HR image. The interpolated pixel is measured using a weighted average of the neighboring pixels within the image grid that blur at HF regions in these methods. Edge degradation is also caused by other edge-directed and learning-based upscaling methods, which produce blurring artifacts. A novel approach is proposed to fill these gaps. Using the concept of unsharp masking (USM), the LR image is blurred adaptively based on the region’s local variance. The sharpened high pass filtered (HPF) image is then obtained by subtracting the adaptively blurred image from the LR image. According to USM, the HPF image is combined with the LR image via a gain factor optimized using the cuckoo search (CS) algorithm. To compensate for the loss caused by upscaling, this pre-processing step is performed prior to interpolation. Aside from that, the edge of the B-spline interpolated image is detected and expanded. Edge expansion of the upscaled image is performed to further restore the HF details and reduce zigzag artifacts introduced by upscaling while also preserving the edge boundary. The proposed method outperforms the Lanczos, Bicubic, and Bilinear schemes in terms of peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) gain of 3.475, 8.3839, and 8.075 dB, respectively. In terms of performance, this method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques both objectively (PSNR and SSIM) and subjectively (visual quality).

Due to the limitations of communication bandwidth, the transmission of high-resolution images or videos between spacecrafts such as satellites and planetary landers and ground stations has always been a challenging task. To address the issue of high-resolution image transmission, we propose a novel image transmission paradigm based on reference-based super resolution (Ref-SR). This approach involves the simultaneous transmission of both high-resolution and low-resolution images between the spacecraft and ground stations. The low-resolution images are transmitted at a high frame rate, while the high-resolution images are transmitted at a lower frame rate. The high-resolution images serve as references to enhance the quality of the low-resolution images, thereby optimizing bandwidth usage while maintaining image clarity. Compared to directly applying super resolution to low-resolution images, which introducing image distortion due to the domain bias between the space image and its training images, our proposed method keeps the consistency of the super-resolved images and the ground truth images. By using high-resolution images as references, the super resolution process is guided to produce more accurate and reliable high-resolution images. Previous ground-based experiments have demonstrated the feasibility of Ref-SR in image and video restoration, and we believe this method has great potential for lunar communication scenarios.

We propose a new high-quality up-scaling technique that extends the existing example based super-resolution (SR) framework. Our approach is based on the fundamental idea that a low-resolution (LR) image could be generated from any of the multiple possible high-resolution (HR) images. Therefore it would be more natural to use multiple predictors of HR patch from LR patch instead of single one. In this work we build a generic framework to estimate an HR image from LR one using an adaptive prior (select the predictor locally) based on the local statistics of LR images. We use natural image patch prior as the HR image statistics. We partition the natural images into documents and group them to discover the inherent topics using probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (pLSA) and also learn the dual dictionaries of HR and LR image patch pairs for each of the topics using sparse dictionary learning technique. Then for test image we infer locally which topic it corresponds to and then we use the corresponding learned dual dictionary to generate HR image. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method over existing state-of-art methods.KeywordsSparse RepresentationSparse CodeSuper ResolutionProbabilistic Latent Semantic AnalysisBicubic InterpolationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Palmprints have been broadly used for personal authentication because they are highly accurate and incur low cost. Most previous works have focused on two-dimensional (2-D) palmprint recognition in the past decade. Unfortunately, 2-D palmprint recognition systems lose the shape information when capturing palmprint images. Moreover, such 2-D palmprint images can be easily forged or affected by noise. Hence, three-dimensional (3-D) palmprint recognition has been regarded as a promising way to further improve the performance of palmprint recognition systems. We have developed a simple, but efficient method for 3-D palmprint recognition by using local features. We first utilize shape index representation to describe the geometry of local regions in 3-D palmprint data. Then, we extract local binary pattern and Gabor wavelet features from the shape index image. The two types of complementary features are finally fused at a score level for further improvements. The experimental results on the Hong Kong Polytechnic 3-D palmprint database, which contains 8000 samples from 400 palms, illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.