Unlike other biometrics such as fingerprints and face, the distinct aspect of iris comes from randomly distributed features. This leads to its high reliability for personal identification, and at the same time, the difficulty in effectively representing such details in an image. This paper describes an efficient algorithm for iris recognition by characterizing key local variations. The basic idea is that local sharp variation points, denoting the appearing or vanishing of an important image structure, are utilized to represent the characteristics of the iris. The whole procedure of feature extraction includes two steps: 1) a set of one-dimensional intensity signals is constructed to effectively characterize the most important information of the original two-dimensional image; 2) using a particular class of wavelets, a position sequence of local sharp variation points in such signals is recorded as features. We also present a fast matching scheme based on exclusive OR operation to compute the similarity between a pair of position sequences. Experimental results on 2 255 iris images show that the performance of the proposed method is encouraging and comparable to the best iris recognition algorithm found in the current literature.

With an increasing emphasis on security, automated personal identification based on biometrics has been receiving extensive attention over the past decade. Iris recognition, as an emerging biometric recognition approach, is becoming a very active topic in both research and practical applications. In general, a typical iris recognition system includes iris imaging, iris liveness detection, and recognition. This paper focuses on the last issue and describes a new scheme for iris recognition from an image sequence. We first assess the quality of each image in the input sequence and select a clear iris image from such a sequence for subsequent recognition. A bank of spatial filters, whose kernels are suitable for iris recognition, is then used to capture local characteristics of the iris so as to produce discriminating texture features. Experimental results show that the proposed method has an encouraging performance. In particular, a comparative study of existing methods for iris recognition is conducted on an iris image database including 2,255 sequences from 213 subjects. Conclusions based on such a comparison using a nonparametric statistical method (the bootstrap) provide useful information for further research.

This article addresses the problem of remote sensing image pan-sharpening from the perspective of generative adversarial learning. We propose a novel deep neural network-based method named pansharpening GAN (PSGAN). To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first attempts at producing high-quality pan-sharpened images with generative adversarial networks (GANs). The PSGAN consists of two components: a generative network (i.e., generator) and a discriminative network (i.e., discriminator). The generator is designed to accept panchromatic (PAN) and multispectral (MS) images as inputs and maps them to the desired high-resolution (HR) MS images, and the discriminator implements the adversarial training strategy for generating higher fidelity pan-sharpened images. In this article, we evaluate several architectures and designs, namely, two-stream input, stacking input, batch normalization layer, and attention mechanism to find the optimal solution for pan-sharpening. Extensive experiments on QuickBird, GaoFen-2, and WorldView-2 satellite images demonstrate that the proposed PSGANs not only are effective in generating high-quality HR MS images and superior to state-of-the-art methods but also generalize well to full-scale images.

Biometrics is a rapidly developing technology that is to identify a person based on his or her physiological or behavioral characteristics. To ensure the correction of authentication, the biometric system must be able to detect and reject the use of a copy of a biometric instead of the live biometric. This function is usually termed "liveness detection". This paper describes a new method for live face detection. Using structure and movement information of live face, an effective live face detection algorithm is presented. Compared to existing approaches, which concentrate on the measurement of 3D depth information, this method is based on the analysis of Fourier spectra of a single face image or face image sequences. Experimental results show that the proposed method has an encouraging performance.

The low spatial resolution of light-field image poses significant difficulties in exploiting its advantage. To mitigate the dependency of accurate depth or disparity information as priors for light-field image super-resolution, we propose an implicitly multi-scale fusion scheme to accumulate contextual information from multiple scales for super-resolution reconstruction. The implicitly multi-scale fusion scheme is then incorporated into bidirectional recurrent convolutional neural network, which aims to iteratively model spatial relations between horizontally or vertically adjacent sub-aperture images of light-field data. Within the network, the recurrent convolutions are modified to be more effective and flexible in modeling the spatial correlations between neighboring views. A horizontal sub-network and a vertical sub-network of the same network structure are ensembled for final outputs via stacked generalization. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world data sets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in peak signal-to-noise ratio and gray-scale structural similarity indexes, which also achieves superior quality for human visual systems. Furthermore, the proposed method can enhance the performance of light field applications such as depth estimation.