Keynote lecture 3: "On gait and soft biometrics for surveillance"

The prime advantage of gait as a biometric is that it can be used for recognition at a distance whereas other biometrics cannot. There is a rich selection of approaches and many advances have been made, as will be reviewed in this talk. Soft biometrics is an emerging area of interest in biometrics where we augment computer vision derived measures by human descriptions. Applied to gait biometrics, this again can be used where other biometric data is obscured or at too low resolution. The human descriptions are semantic and are a set of labels which are converted into numbers. Naturally, there are considerations of language and psychology when the labels are collected. After describing current progress in gait biometrics, this talk will describe how the soft biometrics labels are collected, and how they can be used to enhance recognising people by the way they walk. As well as reinforcing biometrics, this approach might lead to a new procedure for collecting witness statements, and to the ability to retrieve subjects from video using witness statements. Biography: Mark Nixon is the Professor in Computer Vision at the University of Southampton UK. His research interests are in image processing and computer vision. His team develops new techniques for static and moving shape extraction which have found application in automatic face and automatic gait recognition and in medical image analysis. His team were early workers in face recognition, later came to pioneer gait recognition and more recently joined the pioneers of ear biometrics. Amongst research contracts, he was Principal Investigator with John Carter on the DARPA supported project Automatic Gait Recognition for Human ID at a Distance and he was previously with the FP7 Scovis project and is currently with the EU-funded Tabula Rasa project. Mark has published over 400 papers in peer reviewed journals, conference proceedings and technical books His vision textbook, with Alberto Aguado, Feature Extraction and Image Processing (Academic Press) reached 3rd Edition in 2012 and has become a standard text in computer vision. With T. Tan and R. Chellappa, their 2005 book Human ID based on Gait is part of the Springer Series on Biometrics. He has chaired/program chaired BMVC 98, AVBPA 03, IEEE Face and Gesture FG06, ICPR 04, ICB 09, IEEE BTAS 2010, and given many invited talks.