Genetic & Evolutionary Biometrics: Feature extraction from a Machine Learning perspective

Genetic & Evolutionary Biometrics (GEB) is a newly emerging area of study devoted to the design, analysis, and application of genetic and evolutionary computing to the field of biometrics. In this paper, we present a GEB application called GEFE_ML (Genetic and Evolutionary Feature Extraction - Machine Learning). GEFE_ML incorporates a machine learning technique, referred to as cross validation, in an effort to evolve a population of local binary pattern feature extractors (FEs) that generalize well to unseen subjects. GEFE_ML was trained on a dataset taken from the FRGC database and generalized well on two test sets of unseen subjects taken from the FRGC and MORPH databases. GEFE_ML evolved FEs that used fewer patches, had comparable accuracy, and were 54% less expensive in terms of computational complexity.