J.A. Carrasco-Ochoa et al. (Eds.): MCPR 2013, LNCS 7914, pp. 136–144, 2013. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 A New Gaze Analysis Based Soft-Biometric Chiara Galdi 1 , Michele Nappi 1 , Daniel Riccio 2 , Virginio Cantoni 3 , and Marco Porta 3 1 Università degli Studi di Salerno, via Ponte Don Melillo, 84084 Fisciano (Salerno) Italy 2 Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, via Cintia 21, 80126, Napoli 3 Università degli Studi di Pavia, via Ferrata 1, 27100 Pavia chiara.galdi@gmail.com, mnappi@unisa.it, daniel.riccio@unina.it, {virginio.cantoni,marco.porta}@unipv.it Abstract. Soft Biometric traits are physical or behavioral human characteristics like skin color, eye color, gait, used by humans to distinguish their peers. However soft biometric characteristics lack in distinctiveness and permanence to identify an individual uniquely and reliably. In this paper a new Gaze Analysis based Soft-biometric (GAS) is investigated. The way an observer looks at a particular subject, was recorded with a remote eye tracker. Feature vectors were built for each observation and used for testing the system as a recognition system. The accuracy of the GAS system was assessed in terms of Receiving Operating Characteristic curves (ROC), Equal Error Rate (EER) and Cumulative Match Curve (CMC), and provided encouraging results. Keywords: gaze analysis, soft biometrics, eye tracking. 1 Introduction Most studies related to soft biometrics have to date considered the iris as a potential predictor for ethnicity and gender [1]. For example, Qiu et al. have used specific features in the texture of the iris to determine ethnicity—Asian vs. Caucasian [2]. A similar approach has been used to determine gender by Thomas et al. [3]. More recently, the problem of predicting both gender and ethnicity using iris patterns has been addressed by Lagree et al. in 2011 [9]. While undoubtedly related to soft biometrics, however, these studies do not actually aim at identification, but rather at recognizing a single character. On the other hand, in [10], iris color is actually used as a soft biometry for indexing, in order to obtain a subset of identities where actual recognition will be performed. While all the above cited works relate to static aspects of the human eye, eye movements can also be exploited to infer biometrically significant anatomical characteristics of the oculomotor plant [11]. This paper, too, examines a dynamic aspect, with the purpose to assess the relevance of eye movement patterns as a soft biometry [12].