Biometrics-based authentication is a verification ap-

A novel approach to personal verification using the thermal images of palm-dorsa vein patterns is presented in this paper. The characteristics of the proposed method are that no prior knowledge about the objects is necessary and the parameters can be set automatically. In our work, an infrared (IR) camera is adopted as the input device to capture the thermal images of the palm-dorsa. In the proposed approach, two of the finger webs are automatically selected as the datum points to define the region of interest (ROI) on the thermal images. Within each ROI, feature points of the vein patterns (FPVPs) are extracted by modifying the basic tool of watershed transformation based on the properties of thermal images. According to the heat conduction law (the Fourier law), multiple features can be extracted from each FPVP for verification. Multiresolution representations of images with FPVPs are obtained using multiple multiresolution filters (MRFs) that extract the dominant points by filtering miscellaneous features for each FPVP. A hierarchical integrating function is then applied to integrate multiple features and multiresolution representations. The former is integrated by an inter-to-intra personal variation ratio and the latter is integrated by a positive Boolean function. We also introduce a logical and reasonable method to select a trained threshold for verification. Experiments were conducted using the thermal images of palm-dorsas and the results are satisfactory with an acceptable accuracy rate (FRR:2.3% and FAR:2.3%). The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach is valid and effective for vein-pattern verification.

This paper presents a novel vehicle detection approach for detecting vehicles from static images using color and edges. Different from traditional methods, which use motion features to detect vehicles, this method introduces a new color transform model to find important "vehicle color" for quickly locating possible vehicle candidates. Since vehicles have various colors under different weather and lighting conditions, seldom works were proposed for the detection of vehicles using colors. The proposed new color transform model has excellent capabilities to identify vehicle pixels from background, even though the pixels are lighted under varying illuminations. After finding possible vehicle candidates, three important features, including corners, edge maps, and coefficients of wavelet transforms, are used for constructing a cascade multichannel classifier. According to this classifier, an effective scanning can be performed to verify all possible candidates quickly. The scanning process can be quickly achieved because most background pixels are eliminated in advance by the color feature. Experimental results show that the integration of global color features and local edge features is powerful in the detection of vehicles. The average accuracy rate of vehicle detection is 94.9%.

In this paper, a novel local pattern descriptor generated by the proposed local vector pattern (LVP) in high-order derivative space is presented for use in face recognition. Based on the vector of each pixel constructed by computing the values between the referenced pixel and the adjacent pixels with diverse distances from different directions, the vector representation of the referenced pixel is generated to provide the 1D structure of micropatterns. With the devise of pairwise direction of vector for each pixel, the LVP reduces the feature length via comparative space transform to encode various spatial surrounding relationships between the referenced pixel and its neighborhood pixels. Besides, the concatenation of LVPs is compacted to produce more distinctive features. To effectively extract more detailed discriminative information in a given subregion, the vector of LVP is refined by varying local derivative directions from the n th-order LVP in (n-1) th-order derivative space, which is a much more resilient structure of micropatterns than standard local pattern descriptors. The proposed LVP is compared with the existing local pattern descriptors including local binary pattern (LBP), local derivative pattern (LDP), and local tetra pattern (LTrP) to evaluate the performances from input grayscale face images. In addition, extensive experiments conducting on benchmark face image databases, FERET, CAS-PEAL, CMU-PIE, Extended Yale B, and LFW, demonstrate that the proposed LVP in high-order derivative space indeed performs much better than LBP, LDP, and LTrP in face recognition.

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