Unconstrained periocular biometric acquisition and recognition using COTS PTZ camera for uncooperative and non-cooperative subjects

We propose an acquisition and recognition system based only on periocular biometric using the COTS PTZ camera to tackle the difficulty that the full face recognition approach has encountered in highly unconstrained real-world scenario, especially for capturing and recognizing uncooperative and non-cooperative subjects with expression, closed eyes, and facial occlusions. We evaluate our algorithm on the periocular region and compare that to the performance of the full face on the Compass database we have collected. The results have shown that the periocular region, when tackling unconstrained matching, is a much better choice than the full face for face recognition even with less than 2/5 the size of the full face. To be more specific, the periocular matching across all facial manners, i.e., neutral expression, smiling expression, closed eyes, and facial occlusion, is able to achieve 60.7% verification rate at 0.1% false accept rate, a 16.9% performance boost over the full face.