Formula-Driven Data Augmentation and Partial Retinal Layer Copying for Retinal Layer Segmentation

Major retinal layer segmentation methods from OCT images assume that the retina is flattened in advance, and thus cannot always deal with retinas that have changes in retinal structure due to ophthalmopathy and/or curvature due to myopia. To eliminate the use of flattening in retinal layer segmentation for practicality of such methods, we propose novel data augmentation methods for OCT images. Formula-driven data augmentation (FDDA) emulates a variety of retinal structures by vertically shifting each column of the OCT images according to a given mathematical formula. We also propose partial retinal layer copying (PRLC) that copies a part of the retinal layers and pastes it into a region outside the retinal layers. Through experiments using the OCT MS and Healthy Control dataset and the Duke Cyst DME dataset, we demonstrate that the use of FDDA and PRLC makes it possible to detect the boundaries of retinal layers without flattening even retinal layer segmentation methods that assume flattening of the retina.

Multibiometrics Using a Single Face Image

Multibiometrics, which uses multiple biometric traits to improve recognition performance instead of using only one biometric trait to authenticate individuals, has been investigated. Previous studies have combined individually acquired biometric traits or have not fully considered the convenience of the system.Focusing on a single face image, we propose a novel multibiometric method that combines five biometric traits, i.e., face, iris, periocular, nose, eyebrow, that can be extracted from a single face image. The proposed method does not sacrifice the convenience of biometrics since only a single face image is used as input.Through a variety of experiments using the CASIA Iris Distance database, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed multibiometrics method.

Fingerprint Feature Extraction by Combining Texture, Minutiae, and Frequency Spectrum Using Multi-Task CNN

Although most fingerprint matching methods utilize minutia points and/or texture of fingerprint images as fingerprint features, the frequency spectrum is also a useful feature since a fingerprint is composed of ridge patterns with its inherent frequency band. We propose a novel CNN-based method for extracting fingerprint features from texture, minutiae, and frequency spectrum. In order to extract effective texture features from local regions around the minutiae, the minutia attention module is introduced to the proposed method. We also propose new data augmentation methods, which takes into account the characteristics of fingerprint images to increase the number of images during training since we use only a public dataset in training, which includes a few fingerprint classes. Through a set of experiments using FVC2004 DB1 and DB2, we demonstrated that the proposed method exhibits the efficient performance on fingerprint verification compared with a commercial fingerprint matching software and the conventional method.