Biometric Identification from Human Aesthetic Preferences

In recent years, human–machine interactions encompass many avenues of life, ranging from personal communications to professional activities. This trend has allowed for person identification based on behavior rather than physical traits to emerge as a growing research domain, which spans areas such as online education, e-commerce, e-communication, and biometric security. The expression of opinions is an example of online behavior that is commonly shared through the liking of online images. Visual aesthetic is a behavioral biometric that involves using a person’s sense of fondness for images. The identification of individuals using their visual aesthetic values as discriminatory features is an emerging domain of research. This paper introduces a novel method for aesthetic feature dimensionality reduction using gene expression programming. The proposed system is capable of using a tree-based genetic approach for feature recombination. Reducing feature dimensionality improves classifier accuracy, reduces computation runtime, and minimizes required storage. The results obtained on a dataset of 200 Flickr users evaluating 40,000 images demonstrate a 95% accuracy of identity recognition based solely on users’ aesthetic preferences.