Decision Fusion in Identity Verification using Facial Images

Acknowledgements I wish to express my most sincere gratitude to my supervisor Prof. Luc Vandendorpe for granting me the opportunity of carrying out this study. I thank him for his professionalism, encouragement and experienced guidance. My deepest thanks to Prof. Josef Kittler from the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing at the University of Surrey (UK), for his valuable advice and fruitful discussions, and for giving me the opportunity of spending some time in his laboratory. I am equally grateful to Mirek Hamouz and Alex Kostin from the University of Surrey for providing me with automatically determined eye coordinates. Also, I would like to thank Samy Bengio and Christine Marcel from the Institut Dalle Molle d'Intelligence Artificielle Perceptive (Switzerland) for providing speaker verification scores. Many thanks to the examination committee for the many interesting comments that resulted in the considerable improvement of the manuscript. I also would like to thank my fellow researchers and colleagues of the TELE lab for the pleasant working atmosphere. Lastly and most importantly, the love, understanding and encouragement of Virginie were indispensable ingredients to achieve this work.