Eyebrows and eyeglasses as soft biometrics using deep learning

Occlusion due to eyeglasses is one of the main challenges affecting the face and general ocular recognition, including eyebrow matching. In this study, the authors propose a convolutional neural network (CNN)‐based method for (a) eyeglasses detection and segmentation to mitigate its impact on personal recognition in mobile devices and (b) use the shape of the glasses as a soft token of identity (something that one has). They evaluated the efficacy of the proposed eyeglasses segmentation on eyebrow matching and eyeglasses‐based user authentication. To this front, various texture and deep features were evaluated. Using the publicly available large‐scale visible ocular biometric dataset, they show that the proposed methods provide (a) eyeglasses detection and segmentation accuracies of 100 and 97% using CNNs, (b) a 2.51% reduction in eyebrow matching error by removing eyeglass occlusions and (c) eyeglasses matching with a 96.6% accuracy.