Recognition of individuals in cross-spectral environments involves situations where probe and gallery images are captured in distinct wavelength ranges and hence differ significantly in terms of appearance and illumination. In case of heterogeneous periocular images, alleviating this wide appearance gap and learning to extract illumination-invariant features from such local regions become cumbersome, giving rise to a challenging research problem. In this work, we design a novel holistic feature reconstruction-based attention module (H-FRAM) to refine and generate discriminative convolutional features. In contrast to existing spatial and channel attention mechanisms that compute 2-D or 1-D attention weights respectively, H-FRAM calculates the importance of each feature location by performing multi-linear principal component analysis on full 3-D tensor space. In H-FRAM, we claim that the feature reconstruction error, computed in a holistic manner, plays a crucial role in determining the relevance of feature locations. This reconstruction error is found by projecting the input feature map onto a multi-dimensional eigenspace that captures most of the important variations. To our knowledge, this is the first work which explores subspace learning approach in the context of 3-D attention mechanism to capture discriminative feature information. We have created an in-house cross-spectral periocular dataset containing visible and near-infrared images from 200 classes. The images are captured in unconstrained acquisition setup involving unsupervised eye and head movements as well as accessory variations (face masks and eyeglasses). Extensive experiments and ablation studies show that the proposed network achieves state-of-the-art recognition performances on the existing and in-house datasets for heterogeneous and homogeneous periocular recognition as well as heterogeneous face recognition.

Periocular recognition has been an active area of research in the past few years. In spite of the advancements made in this area, the cross-spectral matching of visible (VIS) and near-infrared (NIR) periocular images remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a method based on illumination normalization of VIS and NIR periocular images. Specifically, the approach involves normalizing the images using the difference of Gaussian (DoG) filtering, followed by the computation of a descriptor that captures structural details in the illumination normalized images using histogram of oriented gradients (HOG). Finally, the feature vectors corresponding to the query and the enrolled image are compared using the cosine similarity metric to generate a matching score. Performance of our algorithm has been evaluated on three publicly available benchmark databases of cross-spectral periocular images. Our approach yields significant improvement in performance over the existing approach.

This work presents the 2ndCross-Spectrum Iris/Periocular Recognition Competition (Cross-Eyed2017). The main goal of the competition is to promote and evaluate advances in cross-spectrum iris and periocular recognition. This second edition registered an increase in the participation numbers ranging from academia to industry: five teams submitted twelve methods for the periocular task and five for the iris task. The benchmark dataset is an enlarged version of the dual-spectrum database containing both iris and periocular images synchronously captured from a distance and within a realistic indoor environment. The evaluation was performed on an undisclosed test-set. Methodology, tested algorithms, and obtained results are reported in this paper identifying the remaining challenges in path forward.