iJADE AUTHENTICATOR — AN INTELLIGENT MULTIAGENT BASED FACIAL AUTHENTICATION SYSTEM
In modern consumer e-shopping environments, customer authentication is a critical process for confirming the identity of the customer. Traditional authentication techniques that rely on the customers to proactively identify themselves (using various schemes) can affect the user-friendliness of the e-shopping experience, and therefore reduce the customers' preference for such facilities. In this paper, we propose an innovative intelligent multiagent-based environment, called iJADE (intelligent Java Agent Development Environment) to provide an intelligent agent-based platform in the e-commerce environment. Contemporary agent development platforms are focused on the autonomy and mobility of the agents, whereas iJADE provides an intelligent layer (known as the "conscious layer") to implement various AI (artificial intelligence) functionalities in order to produce "smart" agents. From an implementation perspective, we introduce an innovative e-shopping authentication scheme called the "iJADE Authenticator", which is an invariant face recognition system that uses intelligent mobile agents. This system can provide fully automatic, mobile and reliable user authentication. More importantly, the authentication process can be carried out without the users necessarily being aware of it. Experimental results are presented for a database of 1020 tested face images obtained under conditions of widely varying facial expressions, viewing perspectives and image sizes. An overall average correct recognition rate of over 90% is attained.