Active vision-based face authentication

摘要

The use of biometric data for automated identity verification, is one of the major challenges in secure access control systems.In this paper, several issues related to the application of active vision techniques for identity verification, using facial images, are discussed and a practical system (developed within an European research project), encompassing the active vision paradigm, is described.The system, originally devised for banking applications, uses a pair of active tracking cameras to fixate the face of the subject and extract space-variant images (namely “fixations”) from the most relevant facial features. These features are automatically extracted with a two-level algorithm which uses a morphological filtering stage for a coarse localization, followed by an adaptive template matching.A simple matching algorithm, based on a space-variant representation of facial features, is applied for identity verification and compared with a technique based on the Principal Component Analysis.Several experiments on identity verification, performed on real images, are presented.