by Craig Guthrie, Deputy Editor

Student researchers from West Virginia University have been travelling to an annual “Twins Day” festival held in the aptly named town of Twinsburg, Ohio, for five years. But this year its biometrics collection lab had a new task – recording voice and facial data.

“There has been little-to-no research performed on how similar twins' voices are," said Jeremy Dawson, research assistant professor in the Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. “Automated voice recognition is emerging as a biometric method.”

Dawson said the event, the world’s largest annual gathering of twins and multiples, also gave his lab a rare opportunity to build large datasets of the type of facial images that would typically challenge biometric applications and scenarios.

He told the Twinsburg Bulletin that the facial recognition research could benefit security at crowded events, and had the potential to improve accessibility features for online banking, e-commerce, as well as literal accessibility.

Past research at the event had focused on iris biometrics, with researchers studying how these perform in twins to confirm prior claims that biometrics technology was capable of differentiating between them in scenarios where humans could not.

Dawson said the iris, followed by the fingerprint, was indeed the foremost unique feature on the human body. However, he added, voice and face data develop "chaotically" in life and were therefore unique stamps for each person.

Students from the WVU lab said recording the audio and video data for their collections presented challenges - the stations were outdoors for 10 hours daily and the students had to adjust to the changing conditions - but noted that particular care was taken to keep the data pristine.

Portable sound isolation rooms were set up on site that eliminated background noise, while the university brought a 3-D facial recognition system that used a short-wave infrared camera and could develop a much more comprehensive picture of a person.

Identical and fraternal twins, as well as their other family members over 18, all had video and audio samples recorded. A short, prepared passage of text was recorded from each sibling with speech recognition research conducted on the samples.

"[Sound isolation rooms] are much more efficient collection wise. All you could hear was the participant," said Norville. "This was a really cool hands-on, real world application of biometric science."