Periocular region-based person identification in the visible, infrared and hyperspectral imagery

Face recognition performance degrades significantly under occlusions that occur intentionally or unintentionally due to head gear or hair style. In many incidents captured by surveillance videos, the offenders cover their faces leaving only the periocular region visible. We present an extensive study on periocular region based person identification in video. While, previous techniques have handpicked a single best frame from videos, we formulate, for the first time, periocular region based person identification in video as an image-set classification problem. For thorough analysis, we perform experiments on periocular regions extracted automatically from RGB videos, NIR videos and hyperspectral image cubes. Each image-set is represented by four heterogeneous feature types and classified with six state-of-the-art image-set classification algorithms. We propose a novel two stage inverse Error Weighted Fusion algorithm for feature and classifier score fusion. The proposed two stage fusion is superior to single stage fusion. Comprehensive experiments were performed on four standard datasets, MBGC NIR and visible spectrum (Phillips et al., 2005), CMU Hyperspectral (Denes et al., 2002) and UBIPr (Padole and Proenca, 2012). We obtained average rank-1 recognition rates of 99.8, 98.5, 97.2, and 99.5% respectively which are significantly higher than the existing state of the art. Our results demonstrate the feasibility of image-set based periocular biometrics for real world applications.