Past Projects

Soft Biometrics

Soft Biometrics

Many existing biometric systems collect information like gender, age, height, and eye color from the users during enrollment. However, this ancillary information is used only in the event of false user rejection, when a human operator intervenes to verify these characteristics. This process can be made more efficient if these traits are automatically extracted and incorporated in the decision making process. We propose the utilization of these "soft" biometric traits to complement the identity information provided by the traditional (primary) biometric identifiers like fingerprint and face. Although soft biometric characteristics lack the distinctiveness and permanence to identify an individual uniquely and reliably, they provide some evidence about the user identity that could be exploited to our advantage. Experiments show that the recognition performance of a biometric system can be improved significantly by making use of additional soft biometric user information like gender, ethnicity, and height.

A. K. Jain, S. C. Dass and K. Nandakumar, " Soft Biometric Traits for Personal Recognition Systems", Proc. International Conference on Biometric Authentication (ICBA), pp. 731-738, Hong Kong, July 2004.

A. K. Jain, S. C. Dass and K. Nandakumar, " Can soft biometric traits assist user recognition?", Proceedings of SPIE Defense and Security Symposium, Orlando, FL, April 2004.