StillNoFace · Identity matching from still images without face information

Identity matching from still images without face information

"Problem statement In computer vision, human identity matching from images and/or video has been an active research topic for more than two decades and its popularity is increasing with the increase in computing power. Integrating soft biometrics such as gender, height, weight, age, and ethnicity to a primary biometrics system (e.g., face) has been studied. In most of the existing methods, the problem of human classification assisted by soft biometrics has been approached using facial information. However, in real-life scenarios, such information might not be available (e.g., the face might be covered or occluded). This led to methods that employ information from the human body to perform human identification and tracking based on soft biometrics. Moreover, when we are interested in providing a description of an object or a human, we tend to use visual attributes to accomplish this task. For example, a laptop can have a wide screen, a silver color, and a brand logo, whereas a human can be tall, female, wearing a blue t-shirt and carrying a backpack. Visual attributes in computer vision are equivalent to the adjectives in our speech. We rely on visual attributes since they are a meaningful semantic representation of objects or humans that can be understood by both computers and humans. However, effectively predicting the corresponding visual attributes of a human given an image remains a challenging task. Objectives In this research project, we propose methods for predicting a person’s identity from images without facial information based on soft biometrics and visual attributes. Having as input a still image or a video showing only the body of an individual in the wild, the overall objectives of the project are: • Estimate the gender and soft biometrics of the individual, such as his/her weight and height • Retrieve images of individuals with specific visual attributes, such as ""wearing a hat"", ""sitting on a chair"" Benefit for the society A major application of the outcome of the project is the automated recognition of individuals from images captured by standard cameras in order to allow them to enter to their house or office or to control a car. Moreover, a prominent category of applications involves security and safety in public and private spaces (e.g. airports, train stations, concert halls). In these places, surveillance cameras generally do not provide facial information as the individual’s image may be acquired from the behind. Besides, when it is available, face information may be of low resolution, thus difficult to extract any useful information from it. "

Data: CORDIS, © European Union