Biometrics systems have significantly improved person identification and authentication, playing an important role in personal, national, and global security. However, these systems might be deceived (or spoofed) and, despite the recent advances in spoofing detection, current solutions often rely on domain knowledge, specific biometric reading systems, and attack types. We assume a very limited knowledge about biometric spoofing at the sensor to derive outstanding spoofing detection systems for iris, face, and fingerprint modalities based on two deep learning approaches. The first approach consists of learning suitable convolutional network architectures for each domain, whereas the second approach focuses on learning the weights of the network via back propagation. We consider nine biometric spoofing benchmarks - each one containing real and fake samples of a given biometric modality and attack type - and learn deep representations for each benchmark by combining and contrasting the two learning approaches. This strategy not only provides better comprehension of how these approaches interplay, but also creates systems that exceed the best known results in eight out of the nine benchmarks. The results strongly indicate that spoofing detection systems based on convolutional networks can be robust to attacks already known and possibly adapted, with little effort, to image-based attacks that are yet to come.

Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) has been a frequent topic of research due to many practical applications. However, many of the current solutions are still not robust in real-world situations, commonly depending on many constraints. This paper presents a robust and efficient ALPR system based on the state-of-the-art YOLO object detector. The Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are trained and finetuned for each ALPR stage so that they are robust under different conditions (e.g., variations in camera, lighting, and background). Specially for character segmentation and recognition, we design a two-stage approach employing simple data augmentation tricks such as inverted License Plates (LPs) and flipped characters. The resulting ALPR approach achieved impressive results in two datasets. First, in the SSIG dataset, composed of 2,000 frames from 101 vehicle videos, our system achieved a recognition rate of 93.53% and 47 Frames Per Second (FPS), performing better than both Sighthound and OpenALPR commercial systems (89.80% and 93.03%, respectively) and considerably outperforming previous results (81.80%). Second, targeting a more realistic scenario, we introduce a larger public dataset ¹ dataset, designed to ALPR. This dataset contains 150 videos and 4,500 frames captured when both camera and vehicles are moving and also contains different types of vehicles (cars, motorcycles, buses and trucks). In our proposed dataset, the trial versions of commercial systems achieved recognition rates below 70%. On the other hand, our system performed better, with recognition rate of 78.33% and 35 FPS.The UFPR-ALPR dataset is publicly available to the research community at https://web.inf.ufpr.br/vri/databases/ufpr-alpr/ subject to privacy restrictions.

Significant research has been devoted to detecting people in images and videos. In this paper we describe a human detection method that augments widely used edge-based features with texture and color information, providing us with a much richer descriptor set. This augmentation results in an extremely high-dimensional feature space (more than 170,000 dimensions). In such high-dimensional spaces, classical machine learning algorithms such as SVMs are nearly intractable with respect to training. Furthermore, the number of training samples is much smaller than the dimensionality of the feature space, by at least an order of magnitude. Finally, the extraction of features from a densely sampled grid structure leads to a high degree of multicollinearity. To circumvent these data characteristics, we employ Partial Least Squares (PLS) analysis, an efficient dimensionality reduction technique, one which preserves significant discriminative information, to project the data onto a much lower dimensional subspace (20 dimensions, reduced from the original 170,000). Our human detection system, employing PLS analysis over the enriched descriptor set, is shown to outperform state-of-the-art techniques on three varied datasets including the popular INRIA pedestrian dataset, the low-resolution gray-scale DaimlerChrysler pedestrian dataset, and the ETHZ pedestrian dataset consisting of full-length videos of crowded scenes.

Appearance information is essential for applications such as tracking and people recognition. One of the main problems of using appearance-based discriminative models is the ambiguities among classes when the number of persons being considered increases. To reduce the amount of ambiguity, we propose the use of a rich set of feature descriptors based on color, textures and edges. Another issue regarding appearance modeling is the limited number of training samples available for each appearance. The discriminative models are created using a powerful statistical tool called partial least squares (PLS), responsible for weighting the features according to their discriminative power for each different appearance. The experimental results, based on appearance-based person recognition, demonstrate that the use of an enriched feature set analyzed by PLS reduces the ambiguity among different appearances and provides higher recognition rates when compared to other machine learning techniques.