Periocular Soft Biometrics: A Survey and Applications to Multimedia Forensics and Disinformation Detection
arXiv:2608.14701v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soft-biometric attributes such as gender, age, and ethnicity provide valuable ancillary evidence when full identity recognition is not feasible, supporting applications in forensic investigation, identity verification, surveillance, or detection of synthetic and manipulated media. Among biometric modalities, the periocular region is a robust source of soft-biometric cues, as it often remains visible when other parts of the face are occluded, a frequent condition in forensic evidence and surveillance footage, and can be captured across a wide range of acquisition conditions. In this paper, we provide a survey of demographic attribute estimation from periocular images, covering publicly available datasets, methodological trends from handcrafted descriptors to deep learning architectures, and the state of the art in gender, age, and ethnicity prediction. We discuss use cases relevant to multimedia forensics and disinformation-detection applications, including demographic filtering in surveillance footage, age verification, and the detection of demographic inconsistencies in synthetic data. We also highlight open challenges, including dataset bias, cross-domain generalisation, fairness, ethical aspects, and the lack of forensic-oriented benchmarks.
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[Submitted on 10 Aug 2026]
Title:Periocular Soft Biometrics: A Survey and Applications to Multimedia Forensics and Disinformation Detection
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Abstract:Soft-biometric attributes such as gender, age, and ethnicity provide valuable ancillary evidence when full identity recognition is not feasible, supporting applications in forensic investigation, identity verification, surveillance, or detection of synthetic and manipulated media. Among biometric modalities, the periocular region is a robust source of soft-biometric cues, as it often remains visible when other parts of the face are occluded, a frequent condition in forensic evidence and surveillance footage, and can be captured across a wide range of acquisition conditions. In this paper, we provide a survey of demographic attribute estimation from periocular images, covering publicly available datasets, methodological trends from handcrafted descriptors to deep learning architectures, and the state of the art in gender, age, and ethnicity prediction. We discuss use cases relevant to multimedia forensics and disinformation-detection applications, including demographic filtering in surveillance footage, age verification, and the detection of demographic inconsistencies in synthetic data. We also highlight open challenges, including dataset bias, cross-domain generalisation, fairness, ethical aspects, and the lack of forensic-oriented benchmarks.
Comments: Accepted for publication at ECCV 2026 Workshop on AI for Multimedia Forensics & Disinformation Detection (AI4MFDD2026)
Subjects:
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.14701 [cs.CV]
(or arXiv:2608.14701v1 [cs.CV] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.14701
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Fernando Alonso-Fernandez [view email] [v1] Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:29:46 UTC (10,644 KB)
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