Towards inclusive design in mobile biometry

As mobile devices are becoming more ubiquitous, it is now possible to enhance the security of the phone, as well as remote services requiring identity verification, by means of biometric traits such as fingerprint and speech. We refer to this as mobile biometry. The objective of this study is to increase the usability of mobile biometry for visually impaired users, using face as biometrics. We illustrate a scenario of a person capturing his/her own face images which are as frontal as possible. This is a challenging task for the following reasons. Firstly, a greater variation in head pose and degradation in image quality (e.g., blur, de-focus) is expected due to the motion introduced by the hand manipulation and unsteadiness. Second, for the visually impaired users, there currently exists no mechanism to provide feedback on whether a frontal face image is detected. In this paper, an audio feedback mechanism is proposed to assist the visually impaired to acquire face images of better quality. A preliminary user study suggests that the proposed audio feedback can potentially (a) shorten the acquisition time and (b) improve the success rate of face detection, especially for the non-sighted users.