Kinship verification aims to determine whether two individuals share a familial relationship based on facial information. Cross-gender relationships (i.e., Father-Daughter and Mother-Son) continue to face formidable challenges due to the diversity and uncertainty of genetic inheritance. Existing studies primarily focus on extracting robust features and measuring similarity, with limited attention given to the fuzziness of gender differences. To address this issue, this paper proposes a kinship verification framework based on a fuzzy neural network, which adaptively extracts gender-independent kinship features and handles relationship fuzziness to improve cross-gender verification performance. Specifically, the Swin Transformer, which has demonstrated excellent performance in facial analysis, is employed to extract initial features. A fuzzy neural network is then designed to disentangle gender and kinship features, with a gender recognition task introduced to further enhance this disentanglement and improve the gender independence of kinship features. Subsequently, a multi-metric fuzzy reasoning module is adopted to integrate kinship features, extract latent kinship cues, and leverage a contrastive loss function to effectively mine potential negative sample information, thereby significantly enhancing the model's robustness. Experimental results on three publicly available datasets demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Face recognition systems have been widely deployed in mobile devices for user authentication and payment applications. However, these biometric systems remain vulnerable to face presentation attacks, posing significant security risks. In recent years, numerous countermeasures have been proposed, with analysis of differences between bona fide and attack presentations being a commonly adopted strategy. Nevertheless, the variations in image attributes and region movements have not been thoroughly explored. In attack images, the textures of the facial region and the background tend to be more similar, while local regions often exhibit more consistent directions of movement compared to bona fide presentations. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel face presentation attack detection method that leverages prior knowledge of region relationships. Specifically, each input face image sequence is first divided into small patches, which are then processed by a pre-trained$TimeSformer$network utilizing divided time and space attention mechanisms to extract deep features. Two metrics—$Cosine$similarity and mean squared error ($MSE$)—are subsequently employed to measure the texture similarity and movement relationships of the regions of interest. During the inference phase, these measurements are fused to distinguish bona fide from attack presentations. Extensive ablation and comparison experiments, conducted on six face presentation attack detection (PAD) databases (i.e., Idiap Replay-Attack, CASIA-MFSD, OULU-NPU, MSU-MFSD, 3DMAD, and HKBU-MARs V1+), demonstrate that our method achieves superior detection performance, significantly improving precision over state-of-the-art approaches in most experimental settings.

Kinship verification using facial information determines whether two faces share a familial relationship. Existing methods improve verification by leveraging negative sample information and addressing distribution differences but often extract independent features from parent and child images separately, ignoring variations in pairwise similarity. To overcome this, we propose CI3Former, a Swin-Transformer-based model that enables cross-image information interaction for joint feature extraction. By incorporating a Self-Attention based Interaction (SAI) module within each Swin-Transformer block, our method allows mutual querying between parent and child features, dynamically guiding region-level feature extraction and adaptively focusing on similar regions. Additionally, we introduce a Multi-metric Similarity based Interaction (MSI) module for feature fusion, which processes paired features through similarity measurements before final prediction. The model is trained with contrastive and binary cross-entropy losses to enhance coupled feature learning. Extensive experiments on four kinship verification datasets and a signature verification dataset demonstrate that CI3Former outperforms state-of-the-art methods, showcasing its effectiveness, robustness, and strong cross-task generalization.

Efficient and accurate point cloud feature extraction is crucial for critical tasks such as 3D recognition and semantic segmentation. However, existing global feature extraction methods for 3D data often require designing different models for different input types (point clouds, voxels, and maps). This article proposes an efficient plug-and-play non-iterative clustering method (NICM) to establish a unified point cloud global feature extraction paradigm suitable for any input type to solve the above problems. The core idea of the NICM is to construct the connection between a single point and other global points based only on the cosine similarity between center points to achieve global feature extraction, which has linear complexity characteristics and can be combined with any existing feature extraction model. Additionally, to better integrate the features extracted by NICM and the original model, this article designs an adaptive feature fusion module is designed based on the gate unit, which retains similar features and effectively fuses dissimilar features based on their importance to downstream tasks. We have applied our method to downstream tasks such as point cloud recognition, part segmentation and scene segmentation. Sufficient experiments have proven that our method can provide comprehensive and robust features for the original model, and effectively improve the performance of downstream tasks.

Abstract Pain is a common phenomenon in clinical patients, which indicates patients are suffering from uncomfortable conditions for necessary treatments. So the assessment of pain status becomes a significant task in current medical institutions. Of late, various conventional hand‐crafted or deep learning methods on face images are presented to estimate pain intensity automatically. However, these approaches usually feed the whole face into the automatic estimation system and explore little information on the interdependencies of related regions during the formation of pain expression. In this paper, a hierarchical deep network (HDN) involving regional and holistic information simultaneously is proposed via two scale branches. In HDN, a region‐wise branch is designed to extract features from pain related regions of face images while a global‐wise branch explores the interdependencies of pain related regions. Besides, in global‐wise branch, a multi‐task learning method is employed to detect action units while estimating pain intensity. Finally, the pain estimation outputs of two branches are fused in a decision level. On current pain estimation benchmarks, it is empirically shown that the proposed HDN outperforms the existing methods and the essential components in HDN have key influences on final prediction.

In recent years, image fusion methods based on deep networks have been proposed to combine infrared and visible images for achieving better fusion image. However, issues such as limited training data, scarce reference images and misalignment of multi‐source images, still limit the fusion performance. To address these problems, we propose an end‐to‐end shallow convolutional neural network with structural constraints, which has only one convolutional layer to fuse infrared and visible images. Different from other methods, our proposed model requires less training data and reference images and is more robust to the misalignment of a couple of images. More specifically, the infrared image and the visible image are first provided as inputs to a convolutional layer to extract the information that should be fused; then, all feature maps are concatenated together and fed into a convolutional layer with one channel to obtain the fused image; finally, a structural similarity loss between the fused image and the input infrared and visible images is computed to update the network parameters and eliminate the effects of pixel misalignment. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our proposed method on fusion of infrared and visible images with the performance that outperforms the state‐of‐the‐art methods.

Face presentation attacks are the main threats to face recognition systems, and many presentation attack detection (PAD) methods have been proposed in recent years. Although these methods have achieved significant performance in some specific intrusion modes, difficulties still exist in addressing replayed video attacks. That is because the replayed fake faces contain a variety of aliveness signals, such as eye blinking and facial expression changes. Replayed video attacks occur when attackers try to invade biometric systems by presenting face videos in front of the cameras, and these videos are often launched by a liquid-crystal display (LCD) screen. Due to the smearing effects and movements of LCD, videos captured from the real and replayed fake faces present different motion blurs, which are reflected mainly in blur intensity variation and blur width. Based on these descriptions, a motion blur analysis-based method is proposed to deal with the replayed video attack problem. We first present a 1D convolutional neural network (CNN) for motion blur intensity variation description in the time domain, which consists of a serial of 1D convolutional and pooling filters. Then, a local similar pattern (LSP) feature is introduced to extract blur width. Finally, features extracted from 1D CNN and LSP are fused to detect the replayed video attacks. Extensive experiments on two standard face PAD databases, i.e., relay-attack and OULU-NPU, indicate that our proposed method based on the motion blur analysis significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and shows excellent generalization capability.

The vulnerabilities of face-based biometric systems to presentation attacks have been finally recognized but yet we lack generalized software-based face presentation attack detection (PAD) methods performing robustly in practical mobile authentication scenarios. This is mainly due to the fact that the existing public face PAD datasets are beginning to cover a variety of attack scenarios and acquisition conditions but their standard evaluation protocols do not encourage researchers to assess the generalization capabilities of their methods across these variations. In this present work, we introduce a new public face PAD database, OULU-NPU, aiming at evaluating the generalization of PAD methods in more realistic mobile authentication scenarios across three covariates: unknown environmental conditions (namely illumination and background scene), acquisition devices and presentation attack instruments (PAI). This publicly available database consists of 5940 videos corresponding to 55 subjects recorded in three different environments using high-resolution frontal cameras of six different smartphones. The high-quality print and video-replay attacks were created using two different printers and two different display devices. Each of the four unambiguously defined evaluation protocols introduces at least one previously unseen condition to the test set, which enables a fair comparison on the generalization capabilities between new and existing approaches. The baseline results using color texture analysis based face PAD method demonstrate the challenging nature of the database.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved excellent performance in the field of pattern recognition when huge amount of training data is available. However, training a CNN model is less obvious when only a limited amount of data is given such as in the case of face anti-spoofing problem. It is indeed not easy to collect very large sets of fake faces. Especially for the fully-connected layers, tens of thousands of parameters need to be learned. To tackle this problem of lack of training data in face anti-spoofing, we propose to explore the incorporation of hand-crafted features in the CNN framework. In our proposed approach, the color local binary patterns (LBP) features are extracted from the convolutional feature maps, which are fine tuned based on the VGG-face model. These features are then fed into support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark and publicly available databases showing very interesting performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.