Publications by Guido Borghi

The PopEYE dataset is a specialized collection of 14,976 near-infrared (NIR) images of the human eye region, specifically designed to support the development and benchmarking of computer vision algorithms for eye-state detection and coarse gaze-direction classification. Each image is provided in a fixed resolution of 772 × 520 pixels in 8-bit grayscale PNG format. The acquisition was performed frontally using a custom-developed Maxwellian-view optical configuration, consisting of a board-level CMOS camera and a specialized lens system where the subject's eye is precisely positioned at the focal point. This setup ensures a high-contrast representation of the anterior segment, making the pupil, iris, limbus, and portions of the sclera and eyelids clearly distinguishable under stable 850 nm infrared illumination. The dataset is categorized into six mutually exclusive classes identified through manual annotation supported by fixed visual aids and an expert system algorithm. The classification includes a correct positioning class for eyes open and properly aligned for clinical measurements (8,160 images), a closed class representing full eye closures such as blinks or sustained lid closure (1,790 images), and four directional classes representing gaze shifts relative to the central optical axis, specifically up (1,379 images), down (1,015 images), left (1,296 images), and right (1,336 images). The data captures the natural anatomical variability of 22 subjects and incorporates common real-world artifacts such as specular reflections from NIR sources and partial pupil occlusions by eyelashes or eyelids. By providing standardized labels and high-resolution NIR imagery, PopEYE serves as a robust resource for training machine learning models intended for real-time patient monitoring during ophthalmic examinations.

Ensuring that facial images conform to widely adopted quality guidelines is a crucial step in optimizing the document enrollment workflow, which includes the face verification task. In this paper, we focus on the ISO/ICAO standard, which defines the requirements for facial photographs used in official documents, such as passports, ensuring consistency in face quality and thereby improving reliable recognition by both humans and biometric systems. Generally, ISO/ICAO compliance verification is manually performed through a slow, subjective, and non-scalable process, then to address these challenges, we introduce a fully automated system that assesses face compliance directly from the official standard requirements, eliminating dependence on predefined, hand-crafted features and empirically set thresholds. The method integrates a language model with an innovative prompt learning strategy and a contrastive learning paradigm to assess whether a given facial image satisfies specific quality criteria. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our method achieves competitive accuracy compared to both academic and commercial baselines. By facilitating the integration and maintenance of compliance regulations, the proposed framework offers a practical, scalable, and regulation-centric solution for automated image quality verification. All code and models are publicly available1.

Technologies to enable safe and effective collaboration and coexistence between humans and robots have gained significant importance in the last few years. A critical component useful for realizing this collaborative paradigm is the understanding of human and robot 3D poses using non-invasive systems. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel vision-based system leveraging depth data to accurately establish the 3D locations of skeleton joints. Specifically, we introduce the concept of Pose Nowcasting, denoting the capability of the proposed system to enhance its current pose estimation accuracy by jointly learning to forecast future poses. The experimental evaluation is conducted on two different datasets, providing accurate and real-time performance and confirming the validity of the proposed method on both the robotic and human scenarios.

Adversarial attacks pose a significant threat to the reliability of biometric systems, particularly in security-critical applications such as identity verification and access control. Ensuring robustness against such attacks is essential for the safe deployment of face recognition technologies in real-world scenarios. To advance this goal, the 2025 Adversarial Attack Challenge for Secure Face Recognition was organized as part of the International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB) 2025.The competition focused on two main tracks: Detection, where the objective was to determine whether a given face image is clean or adversarial, and Resilience, which aimed to evaluate recognition systems under adversarial perturbations. Participants were provided with a standardized dataset derived from CelebA and LFW, encompassing both clean samples and adversarial images crafted using ten diverse attack methods targeting evasion and impersonation scenarios. To ensure fairness and reproducibility, all models were trained solely on the data provided, with support from a custom open source adversarial attack package tailored for face recognition.In addition to benchmarking adversarial robustness, the challenge contributes to the research community by releasing the data set and the extensible attack package, allowing further investigation of secure and reliable face recognition systems.