Biometric Authentication using Correlation Filters

Prof. Vijayakumar Bhagavatula

Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering

CyberSecurity Laboratory

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh

In the increasingly e-commerce oriented society, verifying a user's identity is critical for carrying out financial and other transactions with trust. Most current authentication systems are password based making them susceptible to problems such as forgetting the password and passwords being stolen. One way to overcome these problems is to employ biometrics (e.g., fingerprints, face images, signatures, etc.) for authentication. This talk will provide an overview of our research in methods to authenticate a person's identity based on their biometrics. In particular, application of correlation filters to verify the identity based on face images, fingerprint images and iris images will be discussed. Correlation filters are designed in frequency domain and offer several advantages such as shift-invariance, closed-form designs and graceful degradation. Although the focus of this talk is on verification, we will also show results of applying these methods to the task of face identification.

Vijayakumar Bhagavatula received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh and since 1982, he has been a faculty member in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at CMU where he is now a Professor and the Acting Department Head. He served as the Associate Head of the ECE Department from 1994 to 1996. In 2003, he received the Eta Kappa Nu Most Outstanding Teacher award in ECE Department at Carnegie Mellon University and the Carnegie Institute of Technology's Dowd Fellowship for educational contributions. Professor Kumar's research interests include Pattern Recognition (for automatic target recognition and biometrics applications) and Coding and Signal Processing for Data Storage Systems and for Digital Communications. He has authored or co-authored about 350 technical papers in these areas. He served as a Topical Editor for the Information Processing division of Applied Optics. Professor Kumar is a member of Sigma Xi, a senior member of IEEE, a Fellow of SPIE - The International Society of Optical Engineering, and a Fellow of Optical Society of America (OSA). He is listed in Marquis' Who's Who in the World and in the American Men and Women of Sciences.