Soft biometrics
Soft Biometrics traits are physical, behavioural or adhered human characteristics, classifiable in pre–defined human compliant categories. These categories are, unlike in the classical biometric case, established and time–proven by humans with the aim of differentiating individuals. In other words, the soft biometric traits instances are created in a natural way, used by humans to distinguish their peers.[1][2]
Introduction
The beginnings of Soft Biometrics can be identified as laid by Alphonse Bertillon in the 19th century. He first proposed a personal identification system based on biometric, morphological and anthropometric determinations.[3] The most common traits he introduced were colour of eye, hair, beard and skin; shape and size of the head; body characteristics like height or weight as well as indelible marks such as birth marks, scars or tattoos. A majority of these descriptors presently fall into the category of Soft Biometrics.
Jain lately redefined Soft Biometrics as a set of traits providing information about an individual, though these are not able to individually authenticate the subject because they lack distinctiveness and permanence.[4] Further research has shown that a larger set of soft biometric traits can be used to identify individuals. A redefinition of Soft Biometrics was proposed by Reid and Nixon as any characteristic which can be naturally described by humans.[5] Such soft biometrics are well suited to deployment in surveillance applications [6] and research is ongoing to capitalise on these developments. Recently, new soft-biometrics cues have been introduced for the identification of people involved in text chat conversations.[7] The task has become important after that social media have penetrated the everyday life of many people and have offered the possibility of interacting with persons that hide their identity behind nicknames or potentially fake profiles. Soft-biometric cues allow to take into account the conversational nature of text chat interactions.[7][8]
Soft Biometric traits
Traits which accept the above definition include, but are not limited to:
- Physical: skin colour, eye colour, hair colour, presence of beard, presence of moustache, height, weight.
- Behavioural: gait, writing behaviour [7] or keystrokes dynamics.[8]
- Adhered human characteristics: clothes colour, tattoos, accessories.
Soft Biometrics inherit a main part of the advantages of Biometrics and furthermore endorses by its own assets. Some of the advantages include non obtrusiveness, the computational and time efficiency and human compliance. Furthermore, they do not require enrolment, nor the consent or the cooperation of the observed subject.
See also
References
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Further reading
- Can soft biometric traits assist user recognition?. Published in SPIE 2004.
- "Ross et al.", Handbook of multibiometrics, International Series on Biometrics, Vol. 6, Springer 2006.
- Facial marks: Soft biometric for face recognition. Published in ICIP 2009.
- Weight estimation from visual body appearance . Published in BTAS 2010.
- Soft biometrics systems : Reliability and asymptotic bounds. Published in BTAS 2010.
- Color based soft biometry for hooligans detection. Published in ISCAS 2010.
- Person recognition using a bag of facial soft biometrics (BoFSB). Published in MMSP 2010.
- Search Pruning in Video Surveillance Systems: Efficiency-Reliability Tradeoff. Published in ICCV Workshops 2011.
