Face Verification Schemes for Mobile Personal devices

The fast growing public ownership and use of mobile personal programmable communication devices (e.g. PDA’s) create new and exciting opportunities for convenient and secure commercial and service providing transactions. The newer generations of these devices incorporate digital cameras and signature pads, raising the possibility of enhancing the security of mobile transactions using biometric-based authentication. However, implementing biometrics-based athentication on devices that are constrained in their memory size and computational power is a tough technological task. This paper is primarily concerned with wavelet techniques for face verification as part of a multi-modal biometrics-based identity verifier for PDA’s that would include voice and hand-written signature. We shall present preliminary results of comparison of accuracy rates of three face verification schemes: PCA applied in the spatial domain, PCA applied in the low-low subband of wavelet transformed images down to level 5, and wavelet-only feature vectors. Although the experimental sample is relatively small, the results indicate that at level 4 and 5 of wavelet decomposition, the latter two verification schemes perform significantly better than the spatial PCA. The wavelet-only feature vector scheme has the best accuracy rate, and is the most efficient scheme suitable for constrained devices.