Soft biometrics

Soft biometrics is the science of soft biometric features that describe human behavior or physical characteristics. Also included are accessories that can be used to describe a person. In contrast to classic biometrics, the soft biometric features can be classified into humanly compliant and established categories that have always served to differentiate between individuals.

Emergence

Alphonse Bertillon began soft biometrics in the 19th century when he developed a human identification system based on biometric, morphological and anthropometric characteristics. This system included characteristics such as the color of the eyes, hair, beard, and skin; the shape and size of the head; but also the height or weight, as well as moles, scars or tattoos. The vast majority of these descriptors today fall into the category of soft biometrics.

Jain recently discovered soft biometric features as a set of properties that provide information about a person but cannot fully authenticate that person because they are low in discriminatory power and persistence.

Soft biometric features

Characteristics that accept but are not limited to the above definition:

• Physical: skin color, eye color, hair color, presence of beard and mustache, head shape, facial features, height and weight.
• Behavior: gait, keystroke.
• Accessories: clothing color, presence of headgear, bags.

Soft biometric characteristics inherit a major part of the advantages of classic biometrics , but also have their own strengths. Some of the new advantages are the inconspicuous recording, you do not need the consent or cooperation of the observed. Furthermore, the recording and evaluation of the characteristics is cost and time efficient and there is no need for a learning phase ( enrollment ). Ultimately, they are humanly compliant, so you can initiate a search using human descriptions.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ A. Dantcheva, C. Velardo, A. D'Angelo, J.-L. Dugelay: Bag of Soft Biometrics for Person Identification: new trends and challenges. Multimedia Tools and Applications, October 2010, doi : 10.1007 / s11042-010-0635-7
2. ↑ HTF Rhodes: Alphonse Bertillon: Father of Scientific Detection. 1956, http://openlibrary.org/books/OL18720791M/Alphonse_Bertillon_father_of_scientific_detection
3. ^ AK Jain, SC Dass, K. Nandakumar: Soft biometric traits for personal recognition systems. 2004, doi : 10.1007 / 978-3-540-25948-0_99

further reading

• Person recognition using a bag of facial soft biometrics (BoFSB) . Published in MMSP 2010.
• Can soft biometric traits assist user recognition? (PDF; 2.0 MB). Published in SPIE 2004.
• Soft biometrics systems: Reliability and asymptotic bounds . Published in BTAS 2010.
• Ross et al .: Handbook of multibiometrics. International Series on Biometrics, Issue 6, Springer 2006.
• Weight estimation from visual body appearance . Published in BTAS 2010.
• Color based soft biometry for hooligans detection . Published in ISCAS 2010.