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Conference report on IEEE BIOSIG 2013

During September 4 to 6 the 2013 International Conference of the Biometrics Special Interest Group (BIOSIG) took place at Fraunhofer IGD in Darmstadt, Germany and attracted 106 registered participants from 24 countries.

The program was composed of scientific research contributions on the one hand and application oriented presentations on the other hand. The European application context was provided by Krum Garkov, Executive Director of the new European agency for operational management of large-scale IT systems (EU-LISA), who presented a challenging perspective on large-scale biometric operations in the European Union. He addressed border control, ePassports and national ID cards and indicated the future and evolution of these systems. Beyond the key drivers such as E-state, private and business requirements and technology evolution, he discussed challenges and demands for the research and development community.

The second keynote was given jointly by Oliver Bausinger (BSI) and Elham Tabassi (US NIST) about the fingerprint image quality metrics that are being developed in the NFIQ2.0 project. Driving motivation for this research is the insight that quality control of captured biometric samples can strongly influence the performance of large scale identification systems such as the European VIS. The keynote talk presented the candidate features for NFIQ2.0 and reported an overview of the current validation of the selected features on the operational data.

Accepted conference contributions included 14 presentations including fingerprint, face and iris recognition and covered new modalities such as EEG biometrics or mouse dynamics for continuous authentication as well as forensic research papers. Furthermore contributions discussed concerns about security and privacy of biometrics. The relevant techniques in the area of presentation attack detection and template protection are about to supplement biometric systems, in order to improve fake biometric resistance and to prevent potential attacks such as cross matching, identity theft, etc. The poster session with 21 papers was a good mix of research results from academic and industrial research labs and visitors did spend a significant amount of time in the poster exhibition before the start of the social event with the traditional barbeque – best suited for the late summer day – providing lots of opportunities for networking.

On the last conference day an impressive keynote by Anil Jain (Michigan State University) presented recent research on Sketch to Photo Matching. He introduced facial sketches that are used in forensic investigations, which are either drawn by forensic artists or created by  specialized computer software based on a description of the suspect provided by an eyewitness. While the long practiced method of identifying suspects based on theses sketches is slow and tedious, the application of automatic recognition with state of the art face recognition software does not perform very well: sketch probe images are different in nature from gallery photos and thus new algorithms are required to seek for candidates in an identification database. Based on his research Prof. Jain presented results from his prototype system processing facial sketches with high accuracy.

The participants of the conference voted for the best paper and the best poster that was presented at the conference. The winner of the BIOSIG 2013 best paper award is Sandra Cremer for her presentation “Quality driven iris recognition improvement”, which convinced the majority of the participants.

Amongst the poster contributions, Teodors Eglitis is the winner of the BIOSIG 2013 best poster award, which was granted for his work “FPGA based palmprint and palm vein biometric system“

The BIOSIG conference was co-located with two satellite workshops: The meeting of the TeleTrusT Biometric Working Group and the EAB-COST-ACTION joint meeting on a “Strategic Agenda on Ethical, Societal and Privacy Aspects of Biometric Technologies”.

The 2013 BIOSIG conference was jointly organized by the Competence Center for Applied Security Technology (CAST) and the special interest group BIOSIG of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI). The conference was technically co-sponsored by IEEE Biometric Council and the papers will be added to IEEE Xplore.

Next year the BIOSIG conference will take place between September 10 to 12, 2014 in Darmstadt, Germany.

See : www.biosig.org