Ricerc@Sapienza

The research project proposes an automatic system for user recognition exploiting biometric gait acquisition and analysis. The users' data are collected by user mobile devices, e.g., currently widesperad smartphones, equipped with a built-in accelerometer sensor, which nowadays is an extremely common kind of component. The major purpose of the system is to grant the authentication of an enrolled user without any kind of the specific action usually required, e.g., providing username and password or putting their finger on a fingerprint reader sensor. This totally transparent authentication can be done by exploiting a number of useful mechanisms to carry out the acquisition protocol. In order to avoid any explicit user action, suitable signals to start and stop recording will be sent directly from beacons (configurable Bluetooth transmitters) to the user mobile device, once it reaches a close enough position. Each incoming walk signal will be sent to a server that will match them with the enrollment data, stored in advance for the authorized users, and will decide if the subject is to be accepted or refused. Open research problems that
will be tackled are investigation of the most robust and reliable gait features to extract, signal normalization and alignment, and multidevice matching. Moreover, we want to investigate the best way to combine this kind of approach with other well-known and noninvasive capture modalities, possibly based on machine vision, either exploiting the same biometrics, namely gait, or combining it with another very popular technique such as face recognition. This proposed system will be a suitable alternative to traditional user authentication, which requires one or more specific actions, and user attention, and to remember cumbersome usernames and complex passwords. At the end of the project it will be possible to ask for a patent for the overall system architecture and for the
underlying algorithms.