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Touchless fingerprint recognition systems do not require contact of the finger with any acquisition surface and thus provide an increased level of hygiene, usability, and user acceptability of fingerprint-based biometric technologies. The most accurate touchless approaches compute 3-D models of the fingertip. However, a relevant drawback of these systems is that they usually require constrained and highly cooperative acquisition methods. We present a novel, fully touchless fingerprint recognition system based on the computation of 3-D models. It adopts an innovative and less-constrained acquisition setup compared with other previously reported 3-D systems, does not require contact with any surface or a finger placement guide, and simultaneously captures multiple images while the finger is moving. To compensate for possible differences in finger placement, we propose novel algorithms for computing 3-D models of the shape of a finger. Moreover, we present a new matching strategy based on the computation of multiple touch-compatible images. We evaluated different aspects of the biometric system: acceptability, usability, recognition performance, robustness to environmental conditions and finger misplacements, and compatibility and interoperability with touch-based technologies. The proposed system proved to be more acceptable and usable than touch-based techniques. Moreover, the system displayed satisfactory accuracy, achieving an equal error rate of 0.06% on a dataset of 2368 samples acquired in a single session and 0.22% on a dataset of 2368 samples acquired over the course of one year. The system was also robust to environmental conditions and to a wide range of finger rotations. The compatibility and interoperability with touch-based technologies was greater or comparable to those reported in public tests using commercial touchless devices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

People upload daily a huge number of portrait face pictures on websites and social media, which can be processed using biometric systems based on the face characteristics to perform an automatic recognition of the individuals. However, the performance of face recognition approaches can be limited by negative factors as aging, occlusions, rotations, and uncontrolled expressions. Nevertheless, the constantly increasing quality and resolution of the portrait pictures uploaded on websites and social media could permit to overcome these problems and improve the robustness of biometric recognition methods by enabling the analysis of additional traits, like the iris. To point the attention of the research community to the possible use of iris-based recognition techniques for images uploaded on websites and social media, we present a public image dataset called I-SOCIAL-DB (Iris Social Database). This dataset is composed of 3,286 ocular regions, extracted from 1,643 high-resolution face images of 400 individuals, collected from public websites. For each ocular region, a human expert extracted the coordinates of the circles approximating the inner and outer iris boundaries and performed a pixelwise segmentation of the iris contours, occlusions, and reflections. This dataset is the first collection of ocular images from public websites and social media, and one of the biggest collections of manually segmented ocular images in the literature. In this paper, we also present a qualitative analysis of the samples, a set of testing protocols and figures of merit, and benchmark results achieved using publicly available iris segmentation and recognition algorithms. We hope that this initiative can give a new test tool to the biometric research community, aiming to stimulate new studies in this challenging research field. Unlabelled Image • I-SOCIAL-DB is a novel public labeled dataset of ocular images. • I-SOCIAL-DB includes iris segmentation pixel-wise masks created by a human expert. • This paper offers an analysis of the samples based on statistical figures of merit. • This paper presents benchmark results achieved by using public software libraries. • I-SOCIAL-DB represents a new tool for the biometric research community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]