Synonyms
“Light” biometrics
Definition
Any anatomical or behavioral characteristic that provides some information about the identity of a person but does not provide sufficient evidence to precisely determine the identity can be referred to as a soft biometric trait. Personal attributes like gender, ethnicity, age, height, weight, eye color, scars, marks, tattoos, and voice accent are examples of soft biometric traits. Soft biometric information complements the identity information provided by traditional (primary) biometric identifiers such as fingerprint, face, iris, and voice. Hence, utilizing soft biometric traits can improve the recognition accuracy of primary biometric systems.
Introduction
Systems that consolidate evidence from multiple sources of biometric information (e.g., face, fingerprint, hand geometry, iris, etc.) in order to reliably determine the identity of an individual are known as multibiometric systems [1]. Multibiometric systems can alleviate many of the...
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
A. Ross, K. Nandakumar, A.K. Jain, Handbook of Multibiometrics (Springer, Berlin, 2006)
A.K. Jain, K. Nandakumar, X. Lu, U. Park, Integrating faces, fingerprints and soft biometric traits for user recognition, in Proceedings of ECCV International Workshop on Biometric Authentication (BioAW), Prague, LNCS, vol. 3087 (Springer, 2004), pp. 259–269
S. Gutta, J.R.J. Huang, P.J. Phillips, H. Wechsler, Mixture of experts for classification of gender, ethnic origin, and pose of human faces. IEEE Trans. Neural Netw. 11(4), 948–960 (2000)
B. Moghaddam, M.H. Yang, Learning gender with support faces. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 24(5), 707–711 (2002)
X. Lu, A.K. Jain, Ethnicity identification from face images, in Proceedings of SPIE Conference on Biometric Technology for Human Identification, Orlando, vol. 5404, 2004, pp. 114–123
Y.H. Kwon, N.V. Lobo, Age classification from facial images, in Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Patern Recognition, Seattle, 1994, pp. 762–767
A. Lanitis, C. Draganova, C. Christodoulou, Comparing different classifiers for automatic age estimation. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. Part B Cybern. 34(1), 621–628 (2004)
X. Geng, Z.H. Zhou, Y. Zhang, G. Li, H. Dai, Learning from facial aging patterns for automatic age estimation, in Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia, Santa Barbara, 2006, pp. 307–316
H. Ailisto, E. Vildjiounaite, M. Lindholm, S.M. Mkel, J. Peltola, Soft biometrics – combining body weight and fat measurements with fingerprint biometrics. Pattern Recognit. Lett. 27(5), 325–334 (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this entry
Cite this entry
Nandakumar, K., Jain, A.K. (2015). Soft Biometrics. In: Li, S.Z., Jain, A.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biometrics. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7488-4_225
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7488-4_225
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-7487-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7488-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceReference Module Computer Science and Engineering