A virtual curtain for the detection of humans and access control

Biometrics has become a popular field for the development of techniques that aim at recognizing humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical or behavioral traits. In particular, many solutions dedicated to access control integrate biometric features like fingerprinting or face recognition.
This paper describes a new method designed to interpret what happens when crossing an invisible vertical plane, called virtual curtain hereafter, at the footstep of a door frame. It relies on the use of two laser scanners located in the upper corners of the frame, and on the classification of the time series of the information provided by the scanners after registration. The technique is trained and tested on a set of sequences representative for multiple scenarios of normal crossings by a single person and for tentatives to fool the system.
We present the details of the technique and discuss classification results. It appears that the technique is capable to recognize many scenarios which may lead to the development of new commercial applications.