Dans ce travail, une approche de reconnaissance de l’orateur en utilisant un microphone de contact est développée et présentée. L'élément passif de contact est construit à partir d'un matériau piézoélectrique. La position du transducteur piézoélectrique sur le cou de l'individu peut affecter grandement la qualité du signal recueilli et par conséquent les informations qui en sont extraites. Ainsi, le milieu multicouche dans lequel les vibrations des cordes vocales se propagent avant d'être détectées par le transducteur est modélisé. Le meilleur emplacement sur le cou de l’individu pour attacher un élément transducteur particulier est déterminé en mettant en œuvre des techniques de simulation Monte Carlo et, par conséquent, les résultats de la simulation sont vérifiés en utilisant des expériences réelles. La reconnaissance est basée sur le signal généré par les vibrations des cordes vocales lorsqu'un individu parle et non sur le signal vocal à la sortie des lèvres qui est influencé par les résonances dans le conduit vocal. Par conséquent, en raison de la nature variable du signal recueilli, l'analyse a été effectuée en appliquant la technique de transformation de Fourier à court terme pour décomposer le signal en ses composantes de fréquence. Ces fréquences représentent les vibrations des cordes vocales (50-1000 Hz). Les caractéristiques en termes d'intervalle de fréquences sont extraites du spectrogramme résultant. Ensuite, un vecteur 1-D est formé à des fins d'identification. L'identification de l’orateur est effectuée en utilisant deux critères d'évaluation qui sont la mesure de la similarité de corrélation et l'analyse en composantes principales (ACP) en conjonction avec la distance euclidienne. Les résultats montrent qu'un pourcentage élevé de reconnaissance est atteint et que la performance est bien meilleure que de nombreuses techniques existantes dans la littérature. / In this work, a speaker recognition approach using a contact microphone is developed and presented. The contact passive element is constructed from a piezoelectric material. In this context, the position of the piezoelectric transducer on the individual’s neck may greatly affect the quality of the collected signal and consequently the information extracted from it. Thus, the multilayered medium in which the sound propagates before being detected by the transducer is modeled. The best location on the individual’ neck to place a particular transducer element is determined by implementing Monte Carlo simulation techniques and consequently, the simulation results are verified using real experiments. The recognition is based on the signal generated from the vocal cords’ vibrations when an individual is speaking and not on the vocal signal at the output of the lips that is influenced by the resonances in the vocal tract. Therefore, due to the varying nature of the collected signal, the analysis was performed by applying the Short Term Fourier Transform technique to decompose the signal into its frequency components. These frequencies represent the vocal folds’ vibrations (50-1000 Hz). The features in terms of frequencies’ interval are extracted from the resulting spectrogram. Then, a 1-D vector is formed for identification purposes. The identification of the speaker is performed using two evaluation criteria, namely, the correlation similarity measure and the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) in conjunction with the Euclidean distance. The results show that a high percentage of recognition is achieved and the performance is much better than many existing techniques in the literature.

Com a popularização do uso da biometria, determinar a identidade de um indivíduo é uma atividade cada vez mais comum em diversos contextos: controle de acesso físico e lógico, controle de fronteiras, identificações criminais e forenses, pagamentos. Sendo assim, existe uma demanda crescente por Sistemas Automáticos de Identificação Biométrica (ABIS) cada vez mais rápidos, com elevada acurácia e que possam operar com um grande volume de dados. Este trabalho apresenta uma abordagem de implementação de uma central de confrontos para um ABIS de grande escala utilizando um framework de computação em memória. Foram realizados experimentos em uma base de dados real com mais de 50 milhões de impressões digitais em um cluster com até 16 nós. Os resultados mostraram a escalabilidade da solução proposta e a capacidade de operar em grandes bases de dados. / With the popularization of biometrics, personal identification is an increasingly common activity in several contexts: physical and logical access control, border control, criminal and forensic identification, payments. Thus, there is a growing demand for faster and accurate Automatic Biometric Identification Systems (ABIS) capable to handle a large volume of biometric data. This work presents an approach to implement a scalable cluster-based matching platform for a large-scale ABIS using an in-memory computing framework. We have conducted some experiments that involved a database with more than 50 million captured fingerprints, in a cluster up to 16 nodes. The results have shown the scalability of the proposed solution and the capability to handle a large biometric database.

<p>In this study, any change in fingerprint performance, image quality and minutiae count for infants in three different age groups was evaluated (0-6, 7-12, and >12 months). This was done to determine whether there is a difference in performance between infant age groups for a fingerprint recognition system.</p> <p>The purpose of this research was to determine whether there is a difference in infant fingerprint performance and image quality metrics, between three different age groups (0-6, 7-12, and >12 months old), using the same optical sensor? The data used for this secondary analysis was collected as part of a longitudinal multimodal infant study, using the Digital Persona U.are.U 4500. DET curves, zoo analysis, and image quality metrics were used to evaluate performance and quality factored by infant age group.</p><p>This study found that there was a difference in image quality and minutiae count, genuine and impostor match scores, and performance error rates (EER) between the three age groups. Therefore, quality and performance were dependent on age. While there was a difference in performance between age groups, there was generally stability for subjects who overlapped between multiple age groups. Difference in performance was most likely due to the difference in physical characteristics between subjects in each age group, rather than individual instability. The results showed that it could potentially be feasible to use fingerprint recognition for children over the age of 12 months.</p>

M. Tech. (Department of Information Technology, Faculty of Applied and Computer Sciences), Vaal University of Technology. / Computer based assessments have become one of the largest growing sectors in both nonacademic and academic establishments. Successful computer based assessments require security against impersonation and fraud and many researchers have proposed the use of Biometric technologies to overcome this issue. Biometric technologies are defined as a computerised method of authenticating an individual (character) based on behavioural and physiological characteristic features. Basic biometric based computer based assessment systems are prone to security threats in the form of fraud and impersonations. In a bid to combat these security problems, keystroke dynamic technique and facial biometric recognition was introduced into the computer based assessment biometric system so as to enhance the authentication ability of the computer based assessment system. The keystroke dynamic technique was measured using latency and pressure while the facial biometrics was measured using principal component analysis (PCA). Experimental performance was carried out quantitatively using MATLAB for simulation and Excel application package for data analysis. System performance was measured using the following evaluation schemes: False Acceptance Rate (FAR), False Rejection Rate (FRR), Equal Error Rate (EER) and Accuracy (AC), for a comparison between the biometric computer based assessment system with and without the keystroke and face recognition alongside other biometric computer based assessment techniques proposed in the literature. Successful implementation of the proposed technique would improve computer based assessment’s reliability, efficiency and effectiveness and if deployed into the society would improve authentication and security whilst reducing fraud and impersonation in our society.