Among other factors affecting face recognition and verification, the aging of individuals is a particularly challenging one. Unlike other factors such as pose, expression, and illumination, aging is uncontrollable, personalized, and takes place throughout human life. Thus, while the effects of factors such as head pose, illumination, and facial expression on face recognition can be minimized by using images from controlled environments, the effect of aging cannot be so controlled. This work exploits the personalized nature of aging to reduce the effect of aging on face recognition so that an individual can be correctly recognized across his/her different age-separated face images. To achieve this, an individualized face pairing method was developed in this work to pair faces against entire sets of faces grouped by individuals then, similarity score vectors are obtained for both matching and non-matching image-individual pairs, and the vectors are then used for age-invariant face recognition. This model has the advantage of being able to capture all possible face matchings (intra-class and inter-class) within a face dataset without having to compute all possible image-to-image pairs. This reduces the computational demand of the model without compromising the impact of the ageing factor on the identity of the human face. The developed model was evaluated on the publicly available FG-NET dataset, two subsets of the CACD dataset, and a locally obtained FAGE dataset using leave-one-person (LOPO) cross-validation. The model achieved recognition accuracies of 97.01%, 99.89%, 99.92%, and 99.53% respectively. The developed model can be used to improve face recognition models by making them robust to age-variations in individuals in the dataset.

Fingerprint biometric is popularly used for protecting digital devices and applications. They are better and more reliable for authentication in comparison to the usual security tokens or password, which make them to be at the forefront of identity management systems. Though, they have several security benefits, there are several weaknesses of the fingerprint biometric recognition system. The greatest challenge of the fingerprint biometric system is theft or leakage of the template information. Also, each individual has limited and unique fingerprint which is permanent throughout their lifespan, hence, the compromise of the fingerprint biometric will cause a lifetime threat to the security and privacy of such an individual. Security and privacy risk of fingerprint biometric have previously been studied in the context of cryptosystem and cancelable biometric generation. However, these approaches do not obviously address the issue of revocability, diversity and irreversibility of fingerprint features to guard against the wrong use or theft of fingerprint biometric information.  In this paper, we proposed a model that harnesses the strength of Arnold transform and Bio-hashing on fingerprint biometric features to overcome the limitations commonly encountered in sole fingerprint biometric approaches. In the experimental analysis, the result of irreversibility showed 0% False Acceptance Rate (FAR), performance showed maximum of 0.2% FAR and maximum of 0.8% False Rejection Rate (FRR) at different threshold values. Also, the result of renewability/revocability at SMDKAB SMKADKB and SMKBDKA showed that the protection did not match each other. Therefore, the performance of the proposed model was notable and the techniques could be efficiently and reliably used to enforce protection on biometric templates in establishments/organizations so that their information and processes could be secured.

This paper proposes an intuitive approach to facial age classification on child faces – a recursive multi-class binary classification tree – using the texture information obtained from facial images. The face area is divided into small regions from which Local Binary Pattern (LBP) histograms were extracted and concatenated into a single vector efficiently representing a facial image. The classification is based on training a set of binary classifiers using Support Vector Machines (SVMs). Each classifier estimates whether the facial image belongs to a specified age range or not until the last level of the tree is reached where the age is finally determined. Our classification approach also includes an overlapping function that resolves overlaps and conflicts in the outputs of two mutually-exclusive classifiers at each level of the classification tree. Our proposed approach was experimented on a publicly available dataset (FG-NET) and our locally obtained dataset (FAGE) and the results obtained are at par with those of existing works.

One natural and successful technique to have retrieved documents that is relevant to users’ intention is by expanding the original query with other words that best capture the goal of users. However, no matter the means implored on the clustered document while expanding the user queries, only a concept driven document clustering technique has better capacity to spawn results with conceptual relevance to the users’ goal. Therefore, this research extends the Concept Based Thesaurus Network document clustering techniques by using the Latent Semantic Analysis tool to identify the Best Fit Concept Based Document Cluster in the network. The Fuzzy Latent Semantic Query Expansion Model process achieved a better precision and recall rate values on experimentation and evaluations when compared with some existing information retrieval approaches.

Age is a human attribute which grows alongside an individual. Estimating human age is quite difficult for machine as well as humans, however there has been and are still ongoing efforts towards machine estimation of human age to a high level of accuracy. In a bid to improve the accuracy of age estimation from facial image, several approaches have been proposed many of which used Machine Learning algorithms. The several Machine Learning algorithms employed in these works have made significant impact on the results and of performances of the proposed age estimation approaches. In this paper, we examined and compared the performance of a number of Machine Learning algorithms used for age estimation in several previous works. Considering two publicly available facial ageing datasets (FG-NET and MORPH) which have been mostly used in previous works, we observed that Support Vector Machine (SVM) has been most popularly used and a combination/hybridization of SVM for classification (SVC) and regression (SVR) have shown the best performance so far. We also observed that the face modelling or feature extraction techniques employed significantly impacted the performance of age estimation algorithms.

The task of estimating the age of humans from facial image is a challenging one due to the non-linear and personalized pattern of aging differing from one individual to another. In this work, we investigated the problem of estimating the age of humans from their facial image using a GroupWise age ranking approach complemented by ageing pattern correlation learning. In our proposed GroupWise age-ranking approach, we constructed a reference image set grouped according to ages for each individual in the reference set and used this to obtain age-ranks for each age group in the reference set. The constructed reference set was used to obtain transformed LBP features called age-rank-biased LBP (arLBP) features which were used with attached age-ranks to train an age estimating function for predicting the ages of test images. Our experiments on the publicly available FG-NET dataset and a locally collected dataset (FAGE) shows the best known age estimation accuracy with MAE of 2.34 years on FG-NET using the leave-one-person-out strategy.