With recent rapid growth in online shopping, AI-powered Engagement Surfaces (ES) have become ubiquitous across retail services. These engagement surfaces perform an increasing range of functions, including recommending new products for purchase, reminding customers of their orders and providing delivery notifications. Understanding the causal effect of engagement surfaces on value driven for customers and businesses remains an open scientific question. In this paper, we develop a dynamic causal model at scale to disentangle value attributable to an ES, and to assess its effectiveness. We demonstrate the application of this model to inform business decision-making by understanding returns on investment in the ES, and identifying product lines and features where the ES adds the most value.

Face verification involves identifying whether two faces belong to the same person or not. It relies heavily upon face perception, processing, and the decision making of an individual. This research studies cross-domain face verification, where one face image belongs to a controlled, well-illuminated environment, while the other is of a varying representation having differences in image type or quality. Specifically, two cross-domain face verification tasks are analyzed: controlled-low resolution and controlled-sketch face verification. functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data has been collected for 23 participants of two ethnic groups while performing face verification. Statistical comparisons were performed with same-domain controlled face verification for both the tasks. Our findings reveal regions of Right Frontal Gyrus, Bilateral Insula, and Right Middle Cingulate Cortex demonstrating higher activation for controlled-sketch face verification, as compared to controlled face verification. Similar analysis were performed for controlled-low resolution face verification, where regions responsible for higher visual load and difficult tasks result in higher activation. Further, stimuli ethnicity differences influence activations for low-resolution face verification but do not affect sketch face verification. Regions of Right Middle Occipital Gyrus and Right Fusiform Gyrus present higher activity, suggesting increased face processing effort for within ethnicity low resolution face verification. We believe the findings of this research will help enable further development in the field of brain-inspired facial recognition algorithms.

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for matching faces with temporal variations caused due to age progression. The proposed generative adversarial network algorithm is a unified framework that combines facial age estimation and age-separated face verification. The key idea of this approach is to learn the age variations across time by conditioning the input image on the subject's gender and the target age group to which the face needs to be progressed. The loss function accounts for reducing the age gap between the original image and generated face image as well as preserving the identity. Both visual fidelity and quantitative evaluations demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed architecture on different facial age databases for age-separated face recognition.

Identifying kinship relations has garnered interest due to several applications such as organizing and tagging the enormous amount of videos being uploaded on the Internet. Existing research in kinship verification primarily focuses on kinship prediction with image pairs. In this research, we propose a new deep learning framework for kinship verification in unconstrained videos using a novel Supervised Mixed Norm regularization Autoencoder (SMNAE). This new autoencoder formulation introduces class-specific sparsity in the weight matrix. The proposed three-stage SMNAE based kinship verification framework utilizes the learned spatio-temporal representation in the video frames for verifying kinship in a pair of videos. A new kinship video (KIVI) database of more than 500 individuals with variations due to illumination, pose, occlusion, ethnicity, and expression is collected for this research. It comprises a total of 355 true kin video pairs with over 250,000 still frames. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is demonstrated on the KIVI database and six existing kinship databases. On the KIVI database, SMNAE yields video-based kinship verification accuracy of 83.18% which is at least 3.2% better than existing algorithms. The algorithm is also evaluated on six publicly available kinship databases and compared with best reported results. It is observed that the proposed SMNAE consistently yields best results on all the databases.

The widespread use of smartphones has spurred the research in mobile iris devices. Due to their convenience, these mobile devices are also utilized in unconstrained outdoor scenarios. This has necessitated the development of reliable iris recognition algorithms for such uncontrolled environment. At the same time, iris presentation attacks pose a major challenge to current iris recognition systems. It has been shown that print attacks and textured contact lens may significantly degrade the iris recognition performance. Motivated by these factors, we present a novel Mobile Uncontrolled Iris Presentation Attack Database (MUIPAD). The database contains more than 10,000 iris images that are acquired with and without textured contact lenses in indoor and outdoor environments using a mobile sensor. We also investigate the efficacy of textured contact lens in identity impersonation and obfuscation. Moreover, we demonstrate the effectiveness of deep learning based features for iris presentation attack detection on the proposed database.

Reliability and accuracy of iris biometric modality has prompted its large-scale deployment for critical applications such as border control and national ID projects. The extensive growth of iris recognition systems has raised apprehensions about susceptibility of these systems to various attacks. In the past, researchers have examined the impact of various iris presentation attacks such as textured contact lenses and print attacks. In this research, we present a novel presentation attack using deep learning based synthetic iris generation. Utilizing the generative capability of deep con-volutional generative adversarial networks and iris quality metrics, we propose a new framework, named as iDCGAN (iris deep convolutional generative adversarial network) for generating realistic appearing synthetic iris images. We demonstrate the effect of these synthetically generated iris images as presentation attack on iris recognition by using a commercial system. The state-of-the-art presentation attack detection framework, DESIST is utilized to analyze if it can discriminate these synthetically generated iris images from real images. The experimental results illustrate that mitigating the proposed synthetic presentation attack is of paramount importance.

Iris recognition in visible spectrum has developed into an active area of research. This has elevated the importance of efficient presentation attack detection algorithms, particularly in security based critical applications. In this paper, we present the first detailed analysis of the effect of textured contact lenses on iris recognition in visible spectrum. We introduce the first contact lens database in visible spectrum, Unconstrained Visible Contact Lens Iris (UVCLI) Database, containing samples from 70 classes with subjects wearing textured contact lenses in indoor and outdoor environments across multiple sessions. We observe that textured contact lenses degrade the visible spectrum iris recognition performance by over 25% and thus, may be utilized intentionally or unintentionally to attack existing iris recognition systems. Next, three iris presentation attack detection (PAD) algorithms are evaluated on the proposed database and highest PAD accuracy of 82.85%c is observed. This illustrates that there is a significant scope of improvement in developing efficient PAD algorithms for detection of textured contact lenses in unconstrained visible spectrum iris images.

Presentation attacks such as using a contact lens with a printed pattern or printouts of an iris can be utilized to bypass a biometric security system. The first international iris liveness competition was launched in 2013 in order to assess the performance of presentation attack detection (PAD) algorithms, with a second competition in 2015. This paper presents results of the third competition, LivDet-Iris 2017. Three software-based approaches to Presentation Attack Detection were submitted. Four datasets of live and spoof images were tested with an additional cross-sensor test. New datasets and novel situations of data have resulted in this competition being of a higher difficulty than previous competitions. Anonymous received the best results with a rate of rejected live samples of 3.36% and rate of accepted spoof samples of 14.71%. The results show that even with advances, printed iris attacks as well as patterned contacts lenses are still difficult for software-based systems to detect. Printed iris images were easier to be differentiated from live images in comparison to patterned contact lenses as was also seen in previous competitions.

This paper focuses on decoding the process of face verification in the human brain using fMRI responses. 2400 fMRI responses are collected from different participants while they perform face verification on genuine and imposter stimuli face pairs. The first part of the paper analyzes the responses covering both cognitive and fMRI neuro-imaging results. With an average verification accuracy of 64.79% by human participants, the results of the cognitive analysis depict that the performance of female participants is significantly higher than the male participants with respect to imposter pairs. The results of the neuro-imaging analysis identifies regions of the brain such as the left fusiform gyrus, caudate nucleus, and superior frontal gyrus that are activated when participants perform face verification tasks. The second part of the paper proposes a novel two-level fMRI dictionary learning approach to predict if the stimuli observed is genuine or imposter using the brain activation data for selected regions. A comparative analysis with existing machine learning techniques illustrates that the proposed approach yields at least 4.5% higher classification accuracy than other algorithms. It is envisioned that the result of this study is the first step in designing brain-inspired automatic face verification algorithms.

Kinship verification has a number of applications such as organizing large collections of images and recognizing resemblances among humans. In this paper, first, a human study is conducted to understand the capabilities of human mind and to identify the discriminatory areas of a face that facilitate kinship-cues. The visual stimuli presented to the participants determine their ability to recognize kin relationship using the whole face as well as specific facial regions. The effect of participant gender and age and kin-relation pair of the stimulus is analyzed using quantitative measures such as accuracy, discriminability index d' , and perceptual information entropy. Utilizing the information obtained from the human study, a hierarchical kinship verification via representation learning (KVRL) framework is utilized to learn the representation of different face regions in an unsupervised manner. We propose a novel approach for feature representation termed as filtered contractive deep belief networks (fcDBN). The proposed feature representation encodes relational information present in images using filters and contractive regularization penalty. A compact representation of facial images of kin is extracted as an output from the learned model and a multi-layer neural network is utilized to verify the kin accurately. A new WVU kinship database is created, which consists of multiple images per subject to facilitate kinship verification. The results show that the proposed deep learning framework (KVRL-fcDBN) yields the state-of-the-art kinship verification accuracy on the WVU kinship database and on four existing benchmark data sets. Furthermore, kinship information is used as a soft biometric modality to boost the performance of face verification via product of likelihood ratio and support vector machine based approaches. Using the proposed KVRL-fcDBN framework, an improvement of over 20% is observed in the performance of face verification.

Over the years, significant research has been undertaken to improve the performance of face recognition in the presence of covariates such as variations in pose, illumination, expressions, aging, and use of disguises. This paper highlights the effect of illicit drug abuse on facial features. An Illicit Drug Abuse Face (IDAF) database of 105 subjects has been created to study the performance on two commercial face recognition systems and popular face recognition algorithms. The experimental results show the decreased performance of current face recognition algorithms on drug abuse face images. This paper also proposes projective Dictionary learning based illicit Drug Abuse face Classification (DDAC) framework to effectively detect and separate faces affected by drug abuse from normal faces. This important pre-processing step stimulates researchers to develop a new class of face recognition algorithms specifically designed to improve the face recognition performance on faces affected by drug abuse. The highest classification accuracy of 88.81% is observed to detect such faces by the proposed DDAC framework on a combined database of illicit drug abuse and regular faces.

The presence of a contact lens, particularly a textured cosmetic lens, poses a challenge to iris recognition as it obfuscates the natural iris patterns. The main contribution of this paper is to present an in-depth analysis of the effect of contact lenses on iris recognition. Two databases, namely, the IIIT-D Iris Contact Lens database and the ND-Contact Lens database, are prepared to analyze the variations caused due to contact lenses. We also present a novel lens detection algorithm that can be used to reduce the effect of contact lenses. The proposed approach outperforms other lens detection algorithms on the two databases and shows improved iris recognition performance.