Analysing soft clothing biometrics for retrieval

Abstract

Soft biometrics continues to attract research interest. Traditional body and face soft biometrics have been the main research focus and have been proven, by many researchers, to be usable for identification and retrieval. Also, soft biometrics have been shown to provide several advantages over classic biometrics, such as invariance to illumination and contrast. Other than body and face, little attention has focussed on semantic descriptions of an individual, including clothing attributes. Research has yet to concern clothing characteristics as a major or complementary set of biometric traits. In this paper, we analyse the reliability and significance of clothing information for retrieval purposes. We investigate and rate the viability of semantic clothing descriptions to retrieve a subject correctly, given a verbal description of their clothing.