Research and publications related to various topics in biometrics, data science, and cyber security.
Biometric Recognition for Children
The biometric recognition of children provides unique challenges in terms of acquisition of biometric data from infants and developing the capability to consistently and successfully compare this biometric data with the same individuals as they grow from infancy to adulthood. Modalities which are being investigated include the fingerprint, the iris pattern and the outer ear shape.
Optical Coherence Tomography
Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is an optical imaging technique using a low-powered light source to obtain 3D volumetric data from semi-transparent materials, which allows the acquisition of data from below the surface of the skin. This is advantageous as the subsurface fingerprint is less susceptible to various forms of damage and scarring that characterize the surface fingerprint, and has applications in presentation attack detection, i.e. anti-spoofing.
Touchless Fingerprint Acquisition
Contact with a fingerprint platen in the conventional acquisition of exemplar fingerprints has several disadvantages, including pressure distortion, and hygiene risks which reduce the willingness of people from using public fingerprint scanners. Therefore, software and hardware is developed to acquire fingerprints in a touchless manner.
Geoinformatics in Cyber Security
An exploration into the use of geospatial data for applications in cyber security
Handwritten Signature Verification
Handwritten signature verification can be performed on pre-written signatures on paper (offline) and using signatures written in real-time onto a digital device (online). A core advantage of signatures as a biometric trait are that different signatures can be used for various systems and the user is not limited to a single biometric pattern for life.

Biometrics for Children
| Publication Details | Links |
|---|---|
| Biometric Recognition of Infants using Fingerprint, Iris and Ear Biometrics (journal paper) Y. Moolla, A. de Kock, G. Mabuza-Hocquet, C. Ntshangase, N. Nelufule, P. Khanyile,”Biometric Recognition of Infants using Fingerprint, Iris and Ear Biometrics”, IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 38269-38286, 2021 | Publisher (open access) |
| Novel infant biometric tracking invention could curb child trafficking, fraud Times Live, 2021 | News site |
| SA may soon be using new fingerprint tech – that can capture data from 6-week-old babies Business Insider, 2021 | News site |
| Biometrics from Cradle to Grave Y. Moolla, N. Nelufule, CSIR75 Conference, 2020 | Video |
| Biometric Recognition of Children (Presentation) Y. Moolla, “Biometric Recognition of Children”, ID4Africa, 2019 | Download — Publisher |
| Image Quality Assessment for Iris Biometrics for Minors (conference paper) N. Nelufule, A. de Kock, G. Mabuza-Hocquet and Y. Moolla, “Image Quality Assessment for Iris Biometrics for Minors,” Information Communication and Technology and Society Conference, 2019 | Download — Publisher |
| Using Biometrics to Identify Minors Biometrics for Minors team, CSIR, 2017 | Video |
Optical Coherence Tomography Fingerprint Acquisition
| Publication Details | Links |
|---|---|
| Optical Coherence Tomography for Fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection (Book chapter) Y. Moolla, L. Darlow, A. Sharma, A. Singh and J. van der Merwe, “Optical Coherence Tomography for Fingerprint Presentation Attack Detection” in “Handbook of Biometric Anti-Spoofing,” 2nd edition, Marcel et al., Springer, 2019 | Publisher |
| Damage invariant and high security acquisition of the internal fingerprint using optical coherence tomography L. N. Darlow, A. Singh, Y. Moolla, R. Ramokolo, R. van Wyk, N. Botha, L. Webb-Ray. “Damage invariant and high security acquisition of the internal fingerprint using optical coherence tomography,” in the Proceedings of the World Congress on Internet Secruity, 2016, pp. 34-40. | Download |
| Fingerprint Matching with Optical Coherence Tomography Y. Moolla, A. Singh, E. Saith and S. Akhoury, “Fingerprint Matching with Optical Coherence Tomography,” in International Symposium on Visual Computing, Springer, 2015, pp. 237-247 | Download — Publisher |
| Optical Coherence Tomography OCT Team, CSIR, 2017 | Video |
Touchless Fingerprint Acquisition
| Publication Details | Links |
|---|---|
| Complexity and distortion analysis on methods for unrolling 3D to 2D fingerprints (conference paper) C. Mlambo and Y. Moolla, “Mlambo, Cynthia Sthembile, and Yaseen Moolla. “Complexity and distortion analysis on methods for unrolling 3D to 2D fingerprints,” Signal-Image Technology & Internet-Based Systems (SITIS), 2015 11th International Conference on, IEEE, 2015 | Download — Publisher |
Handwritten Signature Verification
| Publication Details | Links |
|---|---|
| Handwritten Signature Verification using Locally Optimized Distance-based Classification (MSc Thesis) Y. Moolla, “Handwritten Signature Verification using Locally Optimized Distance-based Classification”, MSc Thesis, University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2012 | Download |
| Offline signature verification using locally optimized distance-based classification (journal article) Y. Moolla, S. Viriri, F. Nelwamondo and J. Tapamo, “Offline signature verification using locally optimized distance-based classification,” in South African Computer Journal, 2013, 50(1), pp. 15-27 | Publisher (open access) |
| Local directional pattern based signature verification using weighted fractional distance classification (conference paper) Y. Moolla, S. Viriri, J. Tapamo and F. Nelwamondo, “Local directional pattern based signature verification using weighted fractional distance classification,” in Proceedings of the South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists Conference, ACM, 2012, pp. 79-83 | Download — Publisher |
| Handwritten signature verification using weighted fractional distance classification (conference paper) Y. Moolla, S. Viriri, F. Nelwamondo and J. Tapamo, “Handwritten signature verification using weighted fractional distance classification,” in Signal Processing, Communication and Computing (ICSPCC), 2012 IEEE International Conference one, IEEE, 2012, pp. 212-217 | Download — Publisher |
Geoinformatics in Cyber Security
| Publication Details | Links |
|---|---|
| Application of Geospatial Data in Cyber Security Veerasamy, N., Moolla, Y. and Dawood, Z., “Application of Geospatial Data in Cyber security.” in European Conference on Cyber Warfare and Security, 2022, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 305-313 | Publisher (Open Access) |