Periocular recognition remains challenging for deployments in the unconstrained environments. Therefore, this paper proposes an RGB-OCLBCP dual-stream convolutional neural network, which accepts an RGB ocular image and a colour-based texture descriptor, namely Orthogonal Combination-Local Binary Coded Pattern (OCLBCP) for periocular recognition in the wild. The proposed network aggregates the RGB image and the OCLBCP descriptor by using two distinct late-fusion layers. We demonstrate that the proposed network benefits from the RGB image and thee OCLBCP descriptor can gain better recognition performance. A new database, namely an Ethnic-ocular database of periocular in the wild, is introduced and shared for benchmarking. In addition, three publicly accessible databases, namely AR, CASIA-iris distance and UBIPr, have been used to evaluate the proposed network. When compared against several competing networks on these databases, the proposed network achieved better performances in both recognition and verification tasks.

Although robot-based automation in chemistry laboratories can accelerate the material development process, surveillance-free environments may lead to dangerous accidents primarily due to machine control errors. Object detection techniques can play vital roles in addressing these safety issues; however, existing detection models still suffer from insufficient accuracy in environments involving complex and noisy scenes. With the aim of improving safety in a surveillance-free laboratory, we report a deep learning (DL)-based object detector, namely, DenseSSD. For the foremost and frequent problem of detecting positions of transparent chemical vessels, DenseSSD achieved a mean average precision (mAP) over 95% based on a complex dataset involving both empty and solution-filled vials, greatly exceeding those of conventional detectors; such high precision is critical to minimizing failure-induced accidents. Additionally, DenseSSD was observed to be generalizable to other laboratory environments, maintaining its high precisions under the variations of solution colors, camera view angles, background scenes, experiment hardware and type of chemical vessels. Such robustness of DenseSSD supports that it can universally be implemented in diverse laboratory settings. This study conclusively demonstrates the significant utility of DenseSSD in enhancing safety within automated material synthesis environments. Furthermore, the exceptional detection accuracy of DenseSSD opens up possibilities for its application in various other fields and scenarios where precise object detection is paramount.

Traditional biometrics identification performs matching between probe and gallery that may involve the same single or multiple biometric modalities. This paper presents a cross-matching scenario where the probe and gallery are from two distinctive biometrics, i.e., face and periocular, coined as face-periocular cross-identification (FPCI). We propose a novel contrastive loss tailored for face-periocular cross-matching to learn a joint embedding, which can be used as a gallery or a probe regardless of the biometric modality. On the other hand, a hybrid attention vision transformer is devised. The hybrid attention module performs depth-wise convolution and conv-based multi-head self-attention in parallel to aggregate global and local features of the face and periocular biometrics. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model sufficiently improves the performance of FPCI. Besides that, a new face-periocular dataset in the wild, the Cross-modal Face-periocular dataset, is developed for the FPCI models training.