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Explicit Over Implicit: Enhancing CNNs Via Complex Structure Tensor Representations for Periocular Recognition

Summary

The study provides evidence that CNNs struggle to extract orientation features effectively. Using the Complex Structure Tensor, which contains compact orientation features with certainties, as input to CNNs consistently improves identification accuracy compared to grayscale inputs alone. Experiments also demonstrate that inputs provided by mini-complex convnets, combined with reduced CNN sizes, outperformed full-fledged, prevailing CNN architectures. This suggests that the upfront use of orientation features in CNNs, a strategy seen in mammalian vision, not only mitigates their limitations but also enhances their explainability and relevance to thin-clients. Experiments on the Cross-Eyed and PolyU datasets yield a 5-26% reduction in EER, providing strong empirical evidence that explicit o…

SourcearXiv Computer VisionAuthor: Kevin Hernandez-Diaz, Josef Bigun, Fernando Alonso-Fernandez
Explicit Over Implicit: Enhancing CNNs Via Complex Structure Tensor Representations for Periocular Recognition
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[Submitted on 16 Jul 2026]

Title:Explicit Over Implicit: Enhancing CNNs Via Complex Structure Tensor Representations for Periocular Recognition

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Abstract:Our study provides evidence that CNNs struggle to extract orientation features effectively. We show that using the Complex Structure Tensor, which contains compact orientation features with certainties, as input to CNNs consistently improves identification accuracy compared to grayscale inputs alone. Experiments also demonstrated that our inputs, provided by mini-complex convnets, combined with reduced CNN sizes, outperformed full-fledged, prevailing CNN architectures. This suggests that the upfront use of orientation features in CNNs, a strategy seen in mammalian vision, not only mitigates their limitations but also enhances their explainability and relevance to thin-clients. Experiments were conducted on publicly available datasets comprising periocular images (Cross-Eyed and PolyU) for biometric identification and verification in both Close-World and Open-World Scenarios using six CNN architectures. Our experiments on the Cross-Eyed and PolyU datasets yield a 5-26% reduction in EER, providing strong empirical evidence that explicit orientation priors mitigate CNN representational limits in Open-World and Close-World scenarios.

Comments: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2404.15608

Subjects:

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

Cite as: arXiv:2607.15410 [cs.CV]

(or arXiv:2607.15410v1 [cs.CV] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.15410

arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history

From: Kevin Hernandez-Diaz [view email] [v1] Thu, 16 Jul 2026 19:22:22 UTC (5,981 KB)

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Key points and analysis

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Key points

  • CNNs inherently struggle with extracting orientation features; Complex Structure Tensor input effectively addresses this.
  • Using Complex Structure Tensor as input, combined with smaller CNN models, outperforms full-sized mainstream architectures.
  • The method reduces Equal Error Rate by 5-26% in both open-world and closed-world scenarios, validating explicit orientation priors.

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