An Assessment on the Feasibility of Footsteps as a Biometric

现有各种成熟的生物识别技术，其中许多得到EPSRC的Think Crime组合的支持。在过去的两年中，这些技术包括从声音中识别人，从图像和视频序列中识别人脸，手写识别和指纹识别，所有这些都被警察信息技术组织（PITO）确定为“明确的警察应用”。另一个研究的生物特征是步态，一个人走路的方式。步态识别被PITO描述为一种相对萌芽的生物特征，但如果技术成熟，它在警察监控应用中具有潜在的用途。这项研究计划的目的是评估脚步作为生物识别的可行性。作为一种潜在的生物特征足迹识别已经收到很少的关注，反映了公开的文献，并没有以前被认为是由PITO作为一种识别手段。脚步生物识别在隐蔽、不显眼的安全性方面的好处是这项研究提案背后的动力。另一个动机在于增强步态的潜力，其中脚步可以起到支持作用，有助于特征提取和建模。捕获脚步签名的传感器布置被认为是这一提议的绝对关键。在这方面，工作做得特别好。一家当地的中小企业，地板技术有限公司开发了一种回收的，橡胶为基础的商业地砖产品。最近的一项倡议已经证明了嵌入压电传感器的潜力，可以指示瞬态压力。迄今为止，该公司考虑的设想应用是监控特定环境中的“人流”：例如超市和体育场馆。在购物中心中，出于商业和安全原因，可以检测一天中不同时间的流量。然后，分类任务相对简单，即人类/非人类。如果能够推断出更详细的统计数据，例如成年人或未成年人、男性或女性顾客的百分比，就可能获得更多的价值。因此，脚步声“签名”可以被分类为越来越高的细节水平，并最终，作为本研究计划的目标，给一个给定的人，即作为一个生物特征。脚步声生物特征是相对较新的，有一些冒险的研究挑战要解决。为了获得最高的准确度，所有行为生物识别技术都需要大量的训练数据。这是必要的，以实现人的具体的，歧视性的统计模型，能够处理人内的变化在一般世界的人与人之间的变化。获得这些统计数据构成了这项研究计划的核心：特征，分类和规范化战略，以加强歧视和减少外来因素的影响。这些因素往往需要重要的数据库，以跨越信号的一般世界，加上足够的注册数据，为任何给定的类。因此，这项研究计划是收集什么被认为是第一个脚步数据库的一个显着的规模（~100人与多个客户会话），从而产生一个有意义的评估的可行性的脚步作为biometrical. In这个阶段，它是不可能预测的准确性和准确性是一个关键因素的优点，这将不可避免地影响可行的应用。因此，鉴于这项研究建议具有冒险性和高风险性，因此寻求资金，以便进行为期12个月的可行性研究。其目的是回答与基于脚步的生物特征的实施、准确性和商业应用有关的问题。这项为期12个月的可行性研究将为必要的资源提供资金，以科学评估脚步作为生物识别技术的潜力，这是英国在新生物识别技术中获得早期优势的绝佳机会。

A variety of established biometric technologies exist, many supported by the EPSRC's Think Crime portfolio. In the last two years these include the recognition of people from their voices, the recognition of faces from images and video sequences, handwriting recognition and finger print recognition, all of which have been identified by the Police Information Technology Organisation (PITO) as having 'clear police applications'. Another researched biometric is gait, the way a person walks. Gait recognition is described by PITO as a relatively embryonic biometric but one which has potential uses in police surveillance applications should the technology mature. The aim of this research programme is to assess the feasibility of footsteps as a biometric. As a potential biometric footstep recognition has received very little attention as reflected by the open literature and has not previously been considered by PITO as a means of identification. The benefit of the footstep biometric in terms of covert, unobtrusive security is the impetus behind this research proposal. An additional motivation lies in the potential for augmenting gait where footsteps could act in a supportive role, assisting in feature extraction and modelling.The sensor arrangements to capture the footstep signature are seen as absolutely critical to this proposal. In this respect the work is particularly well placed. A local SME, Flooring Technologies Ltd has developed a recycled, rubber based commercial floor tile product. A recent initiative has proven the potential of embedding a piezoelectric sensor that can indicate transient pressures. The envisaged application considered by the company to date is monitoring 'people flow' in given environments: examples include super markets and sports venues. In a shopping mall it might be possible to detect rates of flow at different times of the day for commercial and safety reasons. The classification task is then relatively simple, i.e. human/non-human. Additional value might be obtained if it were possible to deduce more detailed statistics, for example the percentage of customers that are adult or minor, or male or female. Thus footstep 'signatures' could be classified into increasingly higher levels of detail and ultimately, as is the objective of this research programme, to a given person, i.e. as a biometric.The footstep biometric is relatively new and there are a number of adventurous research challenges to be addressed. For the highest accuracies all behavioural biometrics require extensive training data. This is necessary to realise person specific, discriminative statistical models capable of coping with intra-person variations within the general world of inter-person variations. Obtaining these statistics form the heart of this research programme: the features, classifiers and normalisation strategies to enhance discrimination and reduce the influence of extraneous factors. These factors tend to demand significant databases to span the general world of signals plus sufficient enrolment data for any given class. Thus this research programme is to collect what is believed to be the first footstep database of a significant size (~100 persons with multiple client sessions) and will thus produce a meaningful assessment on the feasibility of footsteps as biometric.At this stage it is impossible to predict accuracy and accuracy is a key figure of merit which will inevitably influence viable applications. Thus given the adventurous, high risk nature of this research proposal, funding is sought to enable a 12 month feasibility study. The intention is to answer questions relating to the implementation, accuracy and commercial applications of a footstep-based biometric. This 12 month feasibility study will fund the necessary resources to produce a scientific assessment on the potential of footsteps as a biometric and is an outstanding opportunity for the UK to gain an early advantage in a new biometric.