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"This paper is a postprint of a paper submitted to and accepted for publication in IET Signal Processing and is subject to Institution of Engineering and Technology Copyright. The copy of record is available at IET Digital Library." [Full text of this article is not available in the UHRA]This study presents investigations into the effectiveness of the state-of-the-art speaker verification techniques (i.e. GMM-UBM and GMM-SVM) in mismatched noise conditions. Based on experiments using white and real world noise, it is shown that the verification performance offered by these methods is severely affected when the level of degradation in the test material is different from that in the training utterances. To address this problem, a modified realisation of the parallel model combination (PMC) method is introduced and a new form of test normalisation (T-norm), termed condition adjusted T-norm, is proposed. It is experimentally demonstrated that the use of these techniques with GMM-UBM can significantly enhance the accuracy in mismatched noise conditions. Based on the experimental results, it is observed that the resultant relative improvement achieved for GMM-UBM (under the most severe mismatch condition considered) is in excess of 70%. Additionally, it is shown that the improvement in the verification accuracy achieved in this way is higher than that obtainable with the direct use of PMC with GMM-UBM. Moreover, it is found that while the accuracy performance of GMM-SVM can also considerably benefit from the use of these techniques, the extensive computational cost involved in this case severely limits the use of such a combined approach in practice

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This paper describes the development and quantitative assessment of an approach to face detection (FD), with the application of image classification in mind. The approach adopted is a direct extension of an earlier approach by Huang [Pattern Recognition 19941. Huang's intensity based approach is found to be susceptible t o variations in lighting conditions and complex backgrounds. It is hypothesised that by integrating colour information into Huang's approach, the number of false faces can be reduced. A skin probability map (SPM) is generated from a large quantity of labeled data (530 images containing faces and 714 images that do not) and is used to pre-process colour test images. The SPM allows image regions to be ranked in terms of their skin content, thus removing improbable face regions. The performance improvements are shown in terms of false acceptance (FA) and false rejection (FR) scores. As a front-end to Huang's approach, the benefits of skin segmentation can be seen by a reduction in the FA score from 79% to 15% with a negligible impact on FR.

This paper presents an investigation into the effects, on the accuracy of multimodal biometrics, of introducing unconstrained cohort normalisation (UCN) into the score-level fusion process. Whilst score normalisation has been widely used in voice biometrics, its effectiveness in other biometrics has not been previously investigated. This study aims to explore the potential usefulness of the said score normalisation technique in face biometrics and to investigate its effectiveness for enhancing the accuracy of multimodal biometrics. The experimental investigations involve the two recognition modes of verification and open-set identification, in clean mixed-quality and degraded data conditions. Based on the experimental results, it is demonstrated that the capabilities provided by UCN can significantly improve the accuracy of fused biometrics. The paper presents the motivation for, and the potential advantages of, the proposed approach and details the experimental study.