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TRANSCRIPT
EAB Newsletter, Edition October 2014
EAB Newsletter
Edition October 2014
Editors: Christian Rathgeb, Max Snijder
Contact: [email protected]
Production:
This newsletter is issued by the European Association for Biometrics (EAB). Its content is contributed by the
members of the EAB. If you feel an important news from your biometric sector or from your Region missing –
do not hesitate to submit a news item to the secretariat before the next newsletter is issued (October 2014).
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CONTENT
1. News from the EAB ..................................................................................................... 3
Meet our latest Members ............................................................................................................................... 3
“New” Topics for forthcoming EAB-Newsletters ............................................................................................ 3
EAB-Seminar Biometrics in Banking, London, October 24th .......................................................................... 4
EAB Workshop on Preserving Privacy in an Age of Increased Surveillance – A Biometrics Perspective,
London, October 27th .................................................................................................................................... 4
EAB Members Meeting, Frankfurt, 17th November ........................................................................................ 5
Biometrics Pavilion at EuroID Exhibition ........................................................................................................ 5
EAB Member Profile: the STRaDe Research Group, University of Brno ........................................................... 6
2. EU/EC/EP .................................................................................................................... 8
Agreement on EU DP draft Regulat ion nearly certain during 2015 .................................................................. 8
Reproducible Biometrics Evaluat ion and Test ing with the BEAT Platform ...................................................... 8
Facial Recognit ion by Passport Officers: 14% False Acceptances, 6% False Reject ions ................................... 9
Swiss Researchers from the Idiap Research Inst itute succeeded to spoof a commercial Finger Vein Device .. 10
3. Outside Europe .......................................................................................................... 11
Face Recognit ion, Surveillance and the FBI - NGI .......................................................................................... 11
Fake Cell Towers Allow the NSA and Police to Keep Track of .......................................................................... 11
4. Industry ..................................................................................................................... 12
Huawei launched first Android Smartphone on the Market to feature a Touch Fingerprint Sensor ................ 12
Barclays introduces biometric finger vein reader for customers ................................................................... 12
New Frontier Group to integrate BehavioSec’s behavioral authenticat ion solut ion in online banking ........... 13
Vision-Box® successfully deploys state-of-the-art mult ibiometric Automated Border Clearance eGates at
Hamad Internat ional Airport – Doha, State of Qatar ..................................................................................... 14
IDEX’s new touch sensor selected by WWTT after highly successful evaluat ion .............................................15
Voice recognit ion in elevators leads to interest ing situat ions ........................................................................15
5. Events .......................................................................................................................16
Kick-Off Workshop of Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing, 12-13 November, 2014 ............... 16
ID World International Congress, Frankfurt, Germany 18-20 November 2014 .............................................. 16
International Workshop on Biometrics and Forensics – IWBF’15, Gjøvik, Norway 3-4 March, 2015 ................. 17
International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition - FG'15, Ljubljana, Slovenia 4-8 May
2015 .............................................................................................................................................................. 17
International Conference on Biometrics - ICB'15, Phuket, Thailand 20-24 May 2015 ..................................... 18
IbPRIA 2015: 7th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis, Santiago de Compostela,
Spain 10-12 June 2015 .................................................................................................................................. 18
6th
International Conference on Imaging for Crime Prevention and Detection - ICDP'15, London, UK 15-17 July
2015 ............................................................................................................................................................. 18
6. Reports ..................................................................................................................... 20
Odyssey 2014: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop .............................................................. 20
International Conference on Pattern Recognition: ICPR’14 ........................................................................... 21
EAB Research Projects Conference 2014 ...................................................................................................... 22
German Biometrics Working Group Meeting ................................................................................................ 23
European Biometrics Research and Industry Award 2014 ............................................................................. 24
International Conference of the Biometrics Special Interest Group: BIOSIG’14 ............................................. 25
7. Impressum.................................................................................................................29
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1. News from the EAB
Meet our latest Members
We are now close to 150 members, which means that the EAB is the largest and most relevant
network on biometrics and identity in Europe. The latest new members are:
University of Groningen, Faculty of Law (NL)
Danish Institute for Fire and Security Technology (DK)
United Nations Office for the Coordination of Human Affaires (HU)
EU-LISA (EST)
Salomon Consulting (FR)
Nuance (IE)
IBM UK (UK)
Responsible Technology (FR)
HSB Identification (NL)
These are 9 new members from 7 different countries, which shows the growing representative
nature of the EAB.
“New” Topics for forthcoming EAB-Newsletters
EAB is going to expand the scope of this newsletter. On the one hand, we decide to re-include
topics, for instance about recently finished Master/PhD theses in the area of biometrics. On the
other hand, we decided to include new topic including:
New biometric databases and open source software: this topic will help researchers to
inform other researchers about recently acquired biometric datasets or released
software and to encourage them to use the data/ software in order to conduct
“comparable” research.
Job offerings in the area of biometrics: the EAB newsletter can provide an interface
between and within academia and industry by including job offerings of academic
institutions as well as industry.
Therefore, we highly encourage EAB members as well as recipients of our newsletter to
provide us with information concerning these topics!
Contact: Max Snijder at [email protected]
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EAB-Seminar Biometrics in Banking, London, October 24th
Banking is currently moving into a multi channel environment, with strong developments
towards mobile banking. Comparing to the traditional banking environment we see now new
channels, customers changing channels more easily and alternative payment methods. Gartner
projects that over the next four years the mobile payments industry will experience an average
annual growth of 35 percent, creating a market of more than 450 million users worth USD 721
billion by 2017. According to 2012 CEB TowerGroup Report mobile banking transactions in the
USA are projected to grow by 240% between 2010 and 2015. In the same period, online
transactions are expected to grow at 10%, ATM transactions by 7.3%, whereas the contact
center and the branch are expected to see a decline in transactions. A recent report from
McKinsey states the following:
“Offering a strong payments plan as part of a comprehensive strategy for digital banking is
therefore an imperative for banks. But to compete in this emerging arena, banks must meet
the expectations of digital natives, delivering diverse tools to help customers make smart
decisions across a range of financial services.“
Challenges and opportunities arise regarding customer-service provider relationships, fraud
and fraud prevention, as well as new drivers of convenience and security. Bankers are facing an
increasing challenge on how to decide if the person transacting is actually a genuine client and
not a fraudster. According to a recent Gartner report the most common threat in mobile
payments is that almost 70 percent of mobile phones aren’t protected by passwords. The
availability of biometric authentication at the source (e.g. at the smartphone or tablet) seems
to provide a solid answer to this and certainly constitutes a giant change in the banking world.
It is paramount that biometrics play a pivotal role in key innovations on mobile payments and
other transactions.
The one day workshop will reflect the opportunities of biometrics in the financial market. It will
be discussed how processes can be designed both biometrically protected and privacy
compliant. The speakers intend to provide you with their experience how to take best benefit
of biometric techniques.
Read more: http://www.eab.org/events/program/73
EAB Workshop on Preserving Privacy in an Age of Increased Surveillance – A
Biometrics Perspective, London, October 27th
This workshop is hosted by IBM who are co-organizing this event. The workshop brings
together experts and stakeholders from amongst end users, technology developers,
researchers and jurists to discuss the serious challenges that are posed to privacy by the
application of biometric technologies and explore together ways for addressing them.
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‘Preserving Privacy in an Age of Increased Surveillance – A Biometrics Perspective’ will focus
on privacy issues surrounding biometric technologies and applications helping to understand
key concerns and trends, including:
• Impact of biometrics on privacy
• Privacy protection technologies
• Gaps in knowledge and practice
We will together reflect upon the many new threats and opportunities arising from the rapid
increase in the channels of biometric data capture (e.g. sensors on mobile devices, Google
Glass, …) and processing capabilities.
Read more: http://eab.org/events/program/70
EAB Members Meeting, Frankfurt, 17th November
Just the day before EuroID and the IDWorld conference, on 17th November EAB members can
meet and discuss the latest developments and activities in Frankfurt. It is a good opportunity to
meet and to exchange views and ideas. The agenda is still to be confirmed and will also be
based on your input. Your contributions are welcome! Just send me an email if you have any
suggestions, ideas and/or special requests. A draft agenda will be sent soon.
Entrance is free and for EAB members only!
Contact: Max Snijder at [email protected]
Biometrics Pavilion at EuroID Exhibition
Just like last year, the EAB has facilitated a biometrics pavilion at the EuroID Exhibition and
IDWorld Conference. This time Cognitec, VoiceTrust, FingerprintCards and the EAB will form a
meeting point for visitors who wish to learn more about biometric products and solutions. In
addition, the three companies will take part in a panel discussion which takes place at the
exhibition floor on Wednesday 19 November 2014, 15:00 - 15:50. The title of the discussion will
be “Biometrics goes mobile: a revolution in sensors, algorithms and multi modal solutions”.
Read more:
http://www.mesago.de/en/EID/For_visitors/Wednesday/index.htm
http://www.mesago.de/en/EID/For_exhibitors/Welcome/
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EAB Member Profile: the STRaDe Research Group, University of Brno
The “Security Technology Research and Development” (STRaDe, Czech Republique) research
group is a part of Department of Intelligent Systems at the Faculty of Information Technology,
Brno University of Technology. STRaDe deals mainly with the information technology security
areas, especially biometrics, including both hardware and software. The following three topics
are part of the STRaDe current research agenda.
Influence of Dermatological Diseases to the Fingerprint Recognition:
Dermatological diseases represent an actual, serious but often neglected factor which has a
significant negative influence to the fingerprint recognition process. It has been proven that
every fifth person suffers by some kind of skin disease. This disease causes changes in the
papillary lines structure or the papillary lines can be faded or completely disappeared. Together
with the fact that biometric recognition systems, especially fingerprint recognition systems,
are much more available and price-affordable, companies are using them as their security
access systems. The people affected by such diseases can feel discriminated because these
systems have difficulties during scanning, enrolling and comparing their fingerprints, often
resulting into rejections. In order to develop methods and algorithms which could deal with
dermatological diseases by minimalizing or removing their influence a world-unique database
of fingerprints affected by various fingerprint diseases has been collected. STRaDE is
performing a development of algorithm, which will be able to detect affected areas in the
fingerprint and mark them in order to rejecting these areas from further processing. Some
dermatological diseases affect only part of fingertip, so the recognition decision can be made
from the rest of fingerprint. By marking and eliminating the affected parts from the recognition
process the recognition results will be much more precise because of minimizing the false
minutiae detection, which is quite often situation in affected areas.
Figure 1: Influence of dermatitis to the papillary lines pattern.
3D Face Recognition with the Emphasis on Low-Cost Depth Sensors:
The expansion of personal depth sensors related with the new ways of the human-computer
interaction in recent years markedly lowered the price of 3D acquiring devices for personal use.
This research uses low-cost devices, such as Microsoft Kinect and SoftKinetic DS325 sensors.
The biggest challenge of the face recognition based on the low-cost depth sensors is the
quality of acquired scans.
STRaDe’s approach represents a combination of holistic and feature-based methods, while
using the holistic feature extraction method – Principal Component Analysis (PCA) performed
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on the image representation of the face surface. The taken approach is based on the score-
level fusion of individual recognition units. Each unit processes the input face mesh and
produces a curvature, depth, or texture representation. This image representation is further
processed by specific Gabor or Gauss-Laguerre complex filter. The absolute response is then
projected to lower-dimension representations and the feature vector is thus extracted.
Comparison scores of individual recognition units are combined using Support Vector
Machines (SVM) classifier.
Figure 2: SoftKinetic DepthSense DS325 and sample 3D face scans.
Infrared Facial Image Recognition:
Face recognition based on thermal images has minor importance in comparison to visible light
spectrum recognition. Nevertheless, in the applications such as liveness detection or fever
scan, the thermal face recognition is used as a standalone module, or as a part of a multi-modal
biometric system. Our research investigates the combinations of many methods, used for
thermal face recognition, and introduces some new and modified algorithms, which have not
been used in this area yet. Our methods are mainly based on biometric fusion on different
processing levels.
Figure 3: Thermal facial image using the thermo-camera FLIR.
For more information on STRaDe’s activities and achievements please contact:
Associate Prof. Martin Drahanský
e-mail: [email protected]
Web-page: http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~drahan
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2. EU/EC/EP
Agreement on EU DP draft Regulation nearly certain during 2015
Different stakeholders, speaking at the Privacy Laws & Business 27th Annual International Conference yesterday, indicated that the draft data protection Regulation is now on an irreversible road. Peter Hustinx, European Data Protection Supervisor, said that as the different parties have made their positions public, and consensus is increasing in the Council, the proposal will be adopted. He also said the new European Parliament is not likely to change its negotiating position on any of the main points.
Lilian Mitrou, who chaired the DAPIX Council of Ministers' Committee during the Greek Presidency, said that much progress has been made on the One-Stop-Shop aspects of the proposal and partial agreement has been found on international transfers and territorial applicability. The Italian Presidency which started yesterday, and will continue until the end of the year, will carry on its work from this position, she said.
UK Justice Minister Simon Hughes indicated that the UK is keen to finish the process by the next UK general election in May 2015. The Information Commissioner Christopher Graham stressed that the new law needs to be workable; if many new obligations are imposed on the Regulator, sufficient funds need to be made available.
While there is no definite decision on which instrument will be used, Directive or Regulation, the UK objections to a Regulation are likely to have no effect when it comes to qualified majority voting at the Council, Hustinx said.
Read more: http://www.privacylaws.com/Int_enews_july14_1
Reproducible Biometrics Evaluation and Testing with the BEAT Platform
The BEAT European project ( https://www.beat-eu.org/ ) aims to build a biometry-independent platform for Biometrics research, development and certification. By making use of such a system, academic, governmental or industrial organizations enable users to easily develop processing toolchains, re-use data, algorithms, workflows and compare results from distinct algorithms and/or parameterizations with minimal interaction.
The task of building a general-purpose modality independent evaluation platform is challenging because it must satisfy the requirements of a wide range of experimental and attestation (certication) scenarios. In BEAT, we addressed this task by first going through a formal design phase, where requirements and operational constraints were assembled, before prototyping and implementation took place. This platform must support a number of use-cases defined by its consortium:
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Benchmarking of biometric systems and components: users should be able to program and execute biometric systems so as to identify performance and computing requirements for complete toolchains or individual components;
Comparative evaluation: it should be possible to run challenges and competitions on the platform as it is the case in similar systems such as Bologna University's FVC-onGoing or NIST's i-vector Challenge;
Attestation of single and multimodal biometric systems: the platform should be able to attest on the operation and performance of biometric toolchains so as to support the work of certification agencies or publication claims;
Educational resource: the platform shall be usable as an educational resource for transmitting know-how about biometric applications. It should be possible to set-up interest groups that share work assignments such as in a teacher-student relationship;
Biometric algorithm and system optimization: the platform shall allow users to optimize parameterization or code associated to whole biometric systems or its components in order to optimize overall performance or computing requirements.
The BEAT platform will be presented on Oct 21 2014 at Biometrics 2014 and on Nov 12 2014 during the Kick-Off Workshop of the Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing with a demonstration.
Read more:
https://www.beat-eu.org/platform/ http://www.biometrics2014.com/conference-programme.html http://www.biometrics-center.ch/kickoff-workshop/kickoff-program
Facial Recognition by Passport Officers: 14% False Acceptances, 6% False
Rejections
It wouldn’t be the silly season without a few shock-horror tabloid stories about a footballer managing to travel on his wife’s passport or a mum accidentally using her daughter’s ID document at border control. But there are serious issues associated with these stories, as recent research has shown.
According to Australian media, a study of the country’s passport officers and untrained university students has found that both groups recorded a similar error rate in matching a person to their photo. The results have led the country’s Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) to decide that passport officers have to pass face-matching aptitude tests.
In the study, which was carried out by researchers from the UK’s Universities of Aberdeen and York and Australia’s University of New South Wales and published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, passport officers were asked to decide whether an individual’s photo on a computer screen matched the face of someone standing in front of their desk.
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In 14% of trials, the officials matched the face of the person in front of them with a fraudulent photo and falsely rejected 6% of valid photos. When asked to match current photos of faces to images taken two years ago, error rates rose to 20% - the same as for the students.
Read more:
http://www.linkedin.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fow%2Ely%2FAOuJv&urlhash=Audp&_t=tracking_anet http://securitydocumentworld.com/article-details/i/11689/
Swiss Researchers from the Idiap Research Institute succeeded to spoof a
commercial Finger Vein Device
In a video the researchers show the importance of a secure enrolment process which must assure (i) the enrolled subject is properly authorised to use the system, and (ii) he/she uses the system in the proper manner and is not presenting a spoofed image for enrolment.
This work was carried out by Idiap only with the support from the Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing and relying on the testing platform developed in the European-funded project BEAT.
Read more:
http://www.idiap.ch/scientific-research/news/swiss-researchers-from-the-idiap-research-institute-succeeded-to-spoof-a-commercial-finger-vein-device
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3. Outside Europe
Face Recognition, Surveillance and the FBI - NGI
The documentary "State of Surveillance" examines new technologies such as facial recognit ion
which police departments are using to f ight crime and the civil libert ies concerns raised by
these tools. The FBI is rolling out a sprawling data complex that contains over 147 million mug
shots and sets of f ingerprints, many of which belong to people who are not criminals. This is
done under the program called Next Generat ion Ident ificat ion (NGI, see also EAB Newsletter
edit ion December 2013). Local law enforcement analysts are using surveillance centers to
monitor video feeds and reported crimes minute by minute. Law enforcement agencies say
that many of the technologies make it easier to solve and, in some cases, even prevent crime.
But privacy advocates warn that expanded databases could become dragnets that are
increasingly populated with information about law-abiding cit izens.
Read more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VkKeM-OK6g
http://cironline.org/reports/hollywood-style-surveillance-technology-inches-closer-reality-
6228
Fake Cell Towers Allow the NSA and Police to Keep Track of
The Internet is abuzz with reports of mysterious devices sprinkled across America—many of
them on military bases—that connect to your phone by mimicking cell phone towers and
sucking up your data. There is little public information about these devices, but they are the
new favourite toy of government agencies of all stripes; everyone from the National Security
Agency to local police forces are using them.
These fake towers, known as “interceptors,” were discovered in July by users of the
CryptoPhone500, one of the ultra-secure cell phones released after Edward Snowden’s leaks
about NSA snooping. The phone is essent ially a Samsung Galaxy S3 customized with high-level
encrypt ion that costs around $3,500. While driving around the country, CryptoPhone users
plotted on a map every t ime they connected to a nameless tower (standard towers run by
wireless service providers like Verizon usually have names) and received an alert that the device
had turned off their phone’s encrypt ion (allowing their messages to be read).
Read more:
http://www.newsweek.com/what-cell-ls-those-ominous-phony-towers-268589?piano_d=1
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4. Industry
Huawei launched first Android Smartphone on the Market to feature a
Touch Fingerprint Sensor
September 4th - Huawei launched its global flagship Ascend Mate7, the world's f irst Android
smartphone on the market to feature a touch fingerprint sensor. Fingerprint Cards (FPC) is
proud to announce that Huawei is using Fingerprint touch sensor FPC1020. The FPC1020 sensor
facilitates a better and more intuit ive user experience that unt il now is only available on Apple
iPhone 5S and later models.
FPC1020 has 10-15 t imes lower power consumption compared to competit ion with a best in
class biometric performance. This combined with its reliability and robustness allows
overcoming the challenging condit ions of real-life smartphone usage such as variat ions in skin
humidity, noisy interference in the environment and the need for protect ive sensor coating.
For easy authenticat ion and single hand operat ion, the sensor is mounted on the back of
Ascend Mate7 where it also serves as a camera shutter. The fingerprint sensor automatically
detects if there is a f inger on the sensor and verif ies the fingerprint pattern against a maximum
of f ive enrolled fingers. If an authorized user is detected, the phone seamlessly unlocks without
the need to press any buttons in order to act ivate and unlock the device.
Read more:
http://consumer.huawei.com/minisite/worldwide/Ascend-Mate7/
http://www.fingerprints.com/
Barclays introduces biometric f inger vein reader for customers
September 8, 2014 - Barclays announced it has partnered with Hitachi Europe to launch its
customer authenticat ion solut ion, Barclays Biometric Reader, which is backed by Hitachi’s
Finger Vein Authenticat ion Technology (VeinID).
The launch comes on the heels of Barclay’s roll out of voice biometric capabilit ies for its
telephone banking customers. By scanning the finger, customers can gain fast access to their
online bank accounts and authorize payments without having to enter PIN, passwords or
authenticat ion codes. Barclays said it will begin offering the technology in 2015 to its Barclays
Corporate Banking customers.
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The device is able to accurately read and verify a person’s unique vein patterns in the finger,
which will ult imately help protect UK businesses against ident ity fraud. Barclays said it will not
store records of their customers’ vein patterns, either privately or publically.
A few banks are already using Hitachi’s VeinID for password replacement, single sign on and
ATM machines in Japan, North America and Europe. The Barclays Biometric Reader, which
couples vein biometric and highly secure digital signature technology, offers a f irst for the
global f inancial sector, with the potent ial to expand the technology more widely in UK branch
networks.
“We have shown the technology to a range of businesses and the interest and enthusiasm for
the product is tremendous,” said Ashok Vaswani, CEO Barclays personal and corporate
banking. “The technology has also been tested by Hitachi for many years and it will be game-
changing for UK businesses and consumers.
Read more:
http://www.biometricupdate.com/201409/barclays-introduces-biometric-finger-vein-reader-
for-customers
New Frontier Group to integrate BehavioSec’s behavioral authentication
solution in online banking
October 6, 2014 - New Front ier Group and BehavioSec announced they have partnered to
integrate BehavioSec’s Behavioral Authenticat ion into New Front ier Group’s online banking
solut ion, as well as to resell Behaviosec to NFG customers.
New Frontier Group will implement BehavioSec’s mult i layered approach for authenticat ion
and verif icat ion purposes to boost the security of its iBanking solut ion, all without using any
addit ional hardware. BehavioSec’s solut ion maps a profile behaviour “fingerprint” based on
the individual’s keystroke dynamics or smartphone input such as gestures, touch pressure and
swipe angle. The solut ion then compares this key behaviour to the individual’s historical
records in order to verify his or her ident ify.
BehavioSec’s software, which is currently being used by major banks throughout Europe,
significantly speeds up the fraud detect ion and invest igat ion process by recognizing the
ident ity of the user.
“With BehavioSec we can give our customers the needed security in a cost-effect ive but secure
manner without compromising on the user experience,” said Gregor Bierent, director at New
Front ier Group.
Read more:
http://www.biometricupdate.com/201410/new-front ier-group-to-integrate-behaviosecs-
behavioral-authenticat ion-solut ion-in-online-banking
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Vision-Box® successfully deploys state-of-the-art multibiometric
Automated Border Clearance eGates at Hamad International Airport –
Doha, State of Qatar
Recently opened and already a reference for innovation and passenger experience in the whole
of the Middle East, Hamad Internat ional Airport is now the airport with one of the largest
deployments of ABC eGates in the world.
Doha (Qatar), September 14th, 2014 - The new ground-breaking Hamad Internat ional Airport
(HIA) in Qatar was designed with customer experience to the fore. The result is a world-class
facility, where the concept of hospitality underpins everything. Unsurprisingly, a seamless,
memorable passenger journey was also the motto for the implementat ion of a state-of-the-art
Border Control process at the Airport. Vision-Box®, leader in Automated Border Control
solut ions and expert in Passenger Experience, was contracted by the NDIA Steering Committee
as the partner in charge for the implementat ion of one of the largest deployments of eGates in
one single airport.
The 62 vb i-match® eGates are already in use at the HIA, operated by Vision-Box®’s front-end
Border Control applicat ion, the vb inspector®, and totally integrated with the advanced
Ident ity Management Infrastructure of the Ministry of the Interior of the State of Qatar,
ensuring the highest levels of security and efficiency.
The Vision-Box® eGates were exclusively designed to meet the Hamad International Airport
performance and meticulous design requirements. The multimodal capabilities allow for the
use of face, iris and fingerprint as biometric identifiers. They ensure a speedy passage time with
maximum accuracy, offering state-of-the-art Automated Border Control to several different
traveler profiles, while making sure that the border is secure and that the passenger has a
pleasant experience.
Jean-François Lennon, Director Global Business Development, Sales & Marketing at Vision-
Box®, emphasizes that this implementation represents the largest deployment of multimodal
ABC eGates in the world, and on a single airport. Vision-Box® feels honored to be part of this
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world premiere airport project. “The Middle-East continues to represent an enormous
potential. We’ve been witnessing an outburst of initiatives by Governments, Airports, Airlines
and private sector adopting digital identity as a means to improve security and efficiency, and
also to provide value-added services to their citizens. We look forward to further contributing
to their success, both through on-going Identity Management programs and other GCC
initiatives, by continuously delivering stunning innovation and investing in local resources”.
IDEX’s new touch sensor selected by WWTT after highly successful
evaluation
October 8th - Following the successful evaluat ion of IDEX's new touch based sensor technology,
WWTT has decided to proceed with the IDEX touch sensor following the strong posit ive
market react ion to these devices. These sensors will be incorporated into the WWTT Finger Q
product line which is a smart biometric security system consist ing of a range of mobile
peripherals and a proprietary secure software solut ion.
Kelvin Wong, CEO of WWTT commented: "WWTT showcased our FingerQ product with the
IDEX touch sensors at the Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai. The market response was posit ive as
IDEX's f irst generat ion touch sensor is very well suited to our mobile accessories product line.
We are pleased to cont inue to develop our partnership with IDEX."
Shipment of sensors have begun and will cont inue in large volumes in Q4 of 2014. The IDEX
touch sensor is extremely well adapted to the need for compact, high performance devices that
can be manufactured in large volumes for Smartphones and Mobile payments devices at very
competit ive costs. This sensor is part of a new family of sensors which IDEX will further roll out
over the next year through the strong relat ionships IDEX has forged with its strategic partners
Crucialtech and Cypress. This new generat ion of products will be a game changer regarding
performance, size, cost and capability to the fingerprint biometric sensor market.
" WWTT's select ion of IDEX’s mobile ready touch sensor proves that the IDEX touch sensor is
the best answer for the wide market demand for small f ingerprint sensors” said Dr. Hemant
Mardia, CEO of IDEX.
Read more: www.idex.no
Voice recognition in elevators leads to interesting situations
When biometrics are being used for services false reject ions are certainly to be avoided, as the
following video shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FFRoYhTJQQ
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5. Events
Kick-Off Workshop of Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing, 12-
13 November, 2014
The Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing () is organizing a workshop to kick-off
the center on Nov 12-13 2014. The detailed program is available at http://www.biometrics-
center.ch/kickoff-workshop/kickoff-program and includes as Keynote speakers Jean-
Christophe Fondeur (Morpho) and Nils Tekampe (TUViT). This is mostly a networking event
and participation to the workshop is for researchers willing to become a Partner and to
companies/organizations willing to become an Affiliate.
The workshop is already reaching 50+ participants (researchers, companies such Morpho,
Agnitio, Credit Suisse and organisations such as Police Forces and Forensic labs) registered to
the workshop.
Registration to the event is FREE: http://www.biometrics-center.ch/kickoff-workshop/
Read more:
http://www.biometrics-center.ch
https://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=8107249
ID World International Congress, Frankfurt, Germany 18-20 November 2014
The ID World International Congress is the prime conference on the evolving world of
identification. It is the only international forum that looks at the advanced ID industry as a
whole, rather than focusing on a specific technology or vertical sector. Delegates from all over
the world will meet in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, from 18-20 November 2014 to learn from
their peers and network among experts in the conference as well as in the Euro ID exhibition.
EAB members are invited to secure a space at the Biometrics Pavilion at the EuroID Exhibition
in Frankfurt, which goes alongside the famous IDWorld Conference. You will get a reduction of
15% when you apply for your space at the Biometrics Pavilion. Please contact the secretariat
([email protected]) for further details.
Read more: http://www.mesago.de/de/EID/home.htm
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International Workshop on Biometrics and Forensics – IWBF’15, Gjøvik,
Norway 3-4 March, 2015
The 3rd International Workshop on Biometrics and Forensics (IWBF) will take place on 3-4
March, 2015. The workshop will be hosted by the Norwegian Biometrics Laboratory in Gjøvik,
Norway.
This international workshop is organized by COST Action IC1106 (Integrating Biometrics and
Forensics for the Digital Age). It is an international forum devoted specifically to the
development of synergies between the biometrics and forensic science research areas. IWBF
provides the meeting place for those concerned with the usage of biometric recognition
systems in forensic science applications, attracting participants from industry, research,
academia and users. This workshop will include research in the following areas: - Biometric
evidence for forensic evaluation and investigation - Audiovisual biometrics for multimedia
forensics - Soft biometrics for forensics examination - Forensic behavioural biometrics -
Biometric analysis of crime scene traces and their forensic interpretation - Combination of
multimodal biometrics with other forensic evidence - Ethical and societal implications of
emerging forensics biometrics For more information about IWBF 2015 please visit:
Read more: https://sites.google.com/site/iwbf2015
International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition -
FG'15, Ljubljana, Slovenia 4-8 May 2015
The 11th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture recognition, IEEE FG
2015, will be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia on May 4-8, 2015. IEEE FG 2015 is the premier
international forum for research in image and video-based face, gesture, and body movement
recognition. It presents research that advances the state-of-the-art in these and related areas,
leading to new capabilities in various application domains. The conference will feature a
comprehensive scientific program as well as industry exhibitions and demonstrations of the
most recent technological achievements from academia. The paper submission deadline is
September 30, 2014.
If you want to become an exhibitor or conference sponsor or learn more about the
opportunities for organizers: workshops, tutorials, special sessions, panels:
Read more: http://www.fg2015.org/
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International Conference on Biometrics - ICB'15, Phuket, Thailand 20-24
May 2015
The 8th IAPR International Conference on Biometrics (ICB 2015) is planned to be hosted in
Thailand from May 20th to 22nd , 2015. ICB is an official conference of the IAPR Technical
Committee on Biometrics (TC4) and is also co-sponsored by IEEE Biometrics Council.
For 2015, ICB will be held at Phuket, Thailand. It will have oral sessions, posters, tutorials,
demonstrations, competitions and a government track to coincide with the beginning of
ASEAN Economic Community 2015 (AEC2015).
The conference will have a broad scope and invites papers that advance biometric
technologies, sensor design, feature extraction and matching algorithms, analysis of security
and privacy, and evaluation of social impact of biometrics technology. Topics of interest
include all areas of current Biometrics research and applications.
Read more: http://icb2015.org/
IbPRIA 2015: 7th Iberian Conference on Pattern Recognition and Image
Analysis, Santiago de Compostela, Spain 10-12 June 2015
IbPRIA is an international conference co-organized by the Spanish AERFAI and Portuguese
APRP chapters of the IAPR International Association for Pattern Recognition.
IbPRIA is a single track conference consisting of high quality, previously unpublished papers,
presented either orally or as a poster, intended to act as a forum for research groups, engineers
and practitioners to present recent results, algorithmic improvements and promising future
directions in pattern recognition and image analysis.
Read more: http://www.ibpria.org/2015/
6th International Conference on Imaging for Crime Prevention and Detection
- ICDP'15, London, UK 15-17 July 2015
This conference follows the successful IDSS (Intelligent Distributed Surveillance Systems)
events held in 2003 and 2004 and ICDP 2005, 2006, 2009, 2011 and 2013, to bring together
researchers, industry, end-users, law-enforcing agencies and citizens groups to share
experiences and explore areas where additional research, development and better working
practices are needed, identify possible collaboration and consider the societal impact of such
technologies.
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The 6th International Conference on Imaging for Crime Detection and Prevention (ICDP-15)
aims to create an important networking forum in which participants can discuss the present
and future of image-based technologies for crime detection and prevention.
ICDP (and its predecessor IDSS) has traditionally been a special meeting point of different
disciplines (computer science, social science, engineering, management, etc.) and an
opportunity for a wide range of stakeholders to discuss the many different aspects of the
application of imaging technologies in this socially crucial domain.
Read more: http://www.icdp-conf.org/
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6. Reports
Odyssey 2014: The Speaker and Language Recognition Workshop
Odyssey 2014, which was held from 16-19 June in Joensuu, Finland, is a tutorial and research
workshop of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) and held in
cooperation with the ISCA Speaker and Language Characterization special interest group. In
addition to regular and industry paper submissions, Odyssey 2014 featured a special session co-
organized with the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST): the NIST 2014
Speaker Recognition i-Vector Machine Learning Challenge. The workshop was hosted by the
University of Eastern Finland (UEF) by Chairman Tomi Kinnunen.
The aim of this workshop is to continue
to foster interactions among
researchers in speaker and language
recognition as the successor of previous
successful events held in Martigny
(1994), Avignon (1998), Crete (2001),
Toledo (2004), San Juan (2006),
Stellenbosch (2008), Brno (2010) and
Singapore (2012). Odyssey 2014
workshop tracks were organized with
respect to Speaker Modeling, Language
Recognition, Speaker Diarization, Text-dependent Speaker Recognition, Neural Nets for
Speaker & Language Modeling, and Calibration, Evaluation & Forensics as well as the NIST
i-Vector Special Session. The workshop proceedings comprise 46 papers (88.5% acceptance
rate), which were peer-reviewed by at least 4 (but more often by 5) scientific committee
members. The scientific committee was composed of 77 university, industry, institutional,
forensic, and governmental researchers from 20 countries of 5 continents. The 2014 Odyssey
was attended by exactly 100 participants.
In the NIST i-Vector Special Session, high-performance systems and results were presented.
The 2014 NIST i-Vector Challenge was intended to be readily accessible to participants from
outside the speech processing field, which was facilitated by distributing state-of-the-art
identity vectors (i-vectors) instead of audio data. Compared to the 2012 NIST Speaker
Recognition Evaluation (SRE'12), the i-Vector Challenge saw approximately twice as many
participants, and a nearly two orders of magnitude increase in the number of systems
submitted for evaluation. Initial results indicate that the leading system achieved a relative
improvement of approximately 38% over the provided baseline system. Because i-vector
development data was provided without meta information besides according sample
durations, speaker clustering approaches were examined by the community. The first i-vector
challenge phase had 140 active participants (at least one valid submission), representing 105
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unique sites and producing more than 8000 submissions. A second i-vector challenge phase
started in July 2014 providing additional speaker labels to the development data.
Invited keynote speakers were Samy Bengio
(Google Research), Prof. Martin Cooke (University
of Basque Country), and Joseph P. Campbell (MIT
Lincoln Lab). On the first day, Joseph P. Campbell
gave a comprehensive introduction to speaker
recognition in forensics, and motivated
engagement opportunities in terms of standards,
best-practices, evaluations, and forensic &
investigative speaker recognition databases, such as the NFI-FRITS corpus, which was just
introduced on Odyssey 2014 by the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI). Prof. Martin Cooke
described some of the extensive set of behavioral findings related to human speech
modification, and presented recent computational attempts to apply speaker-inspired
modifications to improve intelligibility in the face of both stationary and non-stationary
maskers. The keynote speech by Samy Bengio highlighted an efficient learning-to-rank
approach that can scale to such data sets and show some annotation results for images and
music databases.
Further, the 2014 Odyssey included a poster session, best paper and best student paper awards
(both for work on unsupervised domain adaptation), and social programs covering among
others Finish sauna, an excursion to the Koli National Park, and orienteering in the forest. The
next workshop, Odyssey 2016, will be held in Bilbao, Spain.
Odyssey 2014 agenda and proceeding papers are free available:
http://cs.uef.fi/odyssey2014/program.php
International Conference on Pattern Recognition: ICPR’14
The 22nd edition of the famous International Conference on
Pattern Recognition (ICPR) took place in Stockholm, Sweden
during 24 – 28 August, hosted by the Swedish Society for
Automated Image Analysis (SSBA). ICPR 2014 provided an
international forum for discussions on recent advances in the
fields of Pattern Recognition, Machine Learning and
Computer Vision, and on applications of these technologies in
various fields, including several tracks on biometric research.
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On the first day of the conference, which was attended by
hundreds of people, Prof. Arun Ross, form the Michigan
State University, USA, received the J.K. Aggarwal prize.
This is an IAPR prize in honour of Professor J.K. Aggarwal,
who is widely recognized for his extensive contributions to
the field of pattern recognition and for his participation in
IAPR?s activities. The recipient is a young scientist, under
the age of 40 at the date of the deadline for nominations,
who has brought a substantial contribution to a field that
is relevant to the IAPR community and whose research
work has had a major impact on the field. In his keynote
speech Prof. Ross provided the audience with an overview
of his research activities which cover numerous areas in
the field of biometrics.
Further, Stan Z. Li, a professor at the National Laboratory
of Pattern Recognition (NLPR), the director of the Center for Biometrics and Security
Research (CBSR), Institute of Automation (CASIA), and the director of the Center for Visual
Internet of Things Research (VIOT) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, gave an
impressive keynote on facial recognition focusing on deep metric learning for person re-
identification.
EAB Research Projects Conference 2014
Biometrics and Identity Management are key
research topics that are currently investigated in a
number EU-projects running under the seventh
Framework program. International research is
dealing with innovative solutions for secure and
privacy compliant biometrics and federated
identity management.
The EAB and according EU-projects jointly
organized a Research Project Conference (EAB-
RPC), to present research results and in order to discuss the benefit of this research for our
European society. This conference to place in Darmstadt from 8-9th September, prior to the
European Biometrics Research and Industry Award and the International Conference of the
Biometrics Special Interest Group (BIOSIG). On this very first edition of the EAB Research
Projects Conference presentations of numerous projects including FIDELITY, FastPass, BEAT,
Future-ID and INGRESS have been given. Partners of each project provided the audience with
overviews as well as technical insights of latest developments and research activities.
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Moreover experts from the biometric community discussed
on a panel Ethical and Privacy Issues of Biometrics and
Identity Management. Furthermore, a second panel was
devoted to discuss and identify future research topics in the
Horizon2020 research program. The conference was well
attended and a second edition is going to take place in
2015.
German Biometrics Working Group Meeting
The EAB partner organization TeleTrusT (TTT) is a
large-scale network of IT-Security related institutions
that is operating the German Biometrics Working
Group. Just prior to final of the EAB-award on
September 10th this group of biometric experts
assembled for its fall meeting in Darmstadt and
featured numerous reports on biometric applications
and most recent research results.
The highlight of the day was the presentation of Peter Waggett (IBM,
UK), who reported about the change of privacy in the light of recent
technological changes. Starting from the discussion about the
widespread installation of CCTV over peer-to-peer surveillance to
recently introduced Google Glasses he discussed the impact of
technology evolution on privacy and society. Further he looked at the
drivers for biometric innovation, which was the state (with CCTV) in the
past and which are now rather business oriented applications (e.g.
Apple’s iPhone or customer specific profiling in shops) or services (e.g. heart-beat
measurement in cars). The talk reflected the Privacy-by-Design principles for technology
design and specifically the revocable biometrics approach as an empowerment concept. The
second presentation by Julien Bringer (Morpho) was specifically addressing Privacy-by-Design
research for Biometrics that is conducted in the context of the BioPriv-project.
Raymond Vedlhuis (University of Twente) discussed the relationship
between ROC (receiver operations characteristic) and CMC
(cumulated match curve) and explained the relation between the
statistics of biometric verification and identification experiments. A
further research talk was contributed by Kiran Raja (Gjøvik
University College), who reported about biometric face and iris
recognition based on new light field cameras.
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An application oriented talk was provided by Marianne
Henriksen (Norwegian Tax Office), who presented the
concept for the modernization of the Norwegian National
Register, in which a central biometric data base and
duplicate enrolment checks will play an important role to
ensure that an individual can receive only one single ID
number. The workshop was concluded with technology
presentation by Laurent Lambert (Morpho), who introduced
the on the fly fingerprint acquisition device that was
developed recently and illustrated its advantages with regard to the contactless fingerprint
capture process. The next meeting of the working group will take place on December 16th in
Berlin.
Slides of the meeting are available at: http://eab.org/events/program/56
European Biometrics Research and Industry Award 2014
On 10 September 2014 the jury of the 8th European Biometrics Research and Industry Award
has selected the three laureates of the 2014 edition of this prestigious competition. In front of
the international jury the following results are announced:
The winner of the European Biometrics Research
Award is Laurent El Shafey from the Idiap
Research Institute (Switzerland) for his thesis
Scalable Probabilistic Models: Applied to Face
Identification in the Wild.
The European Biometrics Industry Award is
granted to Marcos Martinez Diaz from the
Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain) for
his study Graphical Password-based User
Authentication with Free-form Doodles.
The Honorary Certificate has been provided to
Štěpán Mráček from the Brno University of
Technology (Czech Republic) for his thesis 3D
face recognition based on the hierarchical score-
level fusion classifiers.
Patrizio Campisi, Chairman of the award and full professor at the Department of Applied
Electronics at the Università degli Studi "Roma TRE" (Rome, Italy) says about the 2014 edition:
“It is great to see so such high level presentations and excellent motivations by the three
finalists. This benefits the dynamics and quality of biometrics research in Europe.”
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All three finalists have been awarded with a complementary one year EAB membership. In
addition, the winner of the European Biometric Research Award 2014 as well as the winner of
the European Biometric Industry Award 2014 received a commemorative certificate and a
2.000,00 € prize each. The winners were selected by all attending Jury members and EAB
industry members. The awards are kindly sponsored by Morpho (Safran Group).
Winners of the Awards 2014 together
with the jury: Front (left to right): Štěpán
Mráček, Marcos Martinez Diaz, Laurent
El Shafey - Back (left to right): Jim
Wayman, Christoph Busch, Raymond
Veldhuis, Alexander Nouak, Günther
Schumacher, Jean-Christophe Fondeur,
Patrizio Campisi
Jean-Christoph Fondeur, VP, Research &
Technology at Morpho, says: “This
award leverages European research on biometrics to an international level. At Morpho we are
happy and honored to support this unique event, because we are convinced that our society will
benefit from scientific advances derived from state of the art research. The European
Biometrics Research and Industry Awards is unique in its kind and we are motivated to continue
contributing to its further growth and success.”
International Conference of the Biometrics Special Interest Group:
BIOSIG’14
During 10 – 12 September the 13th edition of International Conference of the Biometrics Special
Interest Group (BIOSIG) took place at Fraunhofer IGD in Darmstadt, Germany and attracted 82
registered participants from 21 countries.
The program was composed of scientific research
contributions on the one hand and application oriented
presentations as well as technology transfer examples on
the other hand. The opening keynote talk was provided
by Jean-Christophe Fondeur, who is the vice president
research & technology for Morpho. He illustrated the long
path of biometric evolution over 25 years from small
forensic systems to large scale AFIS and commercial
application. Applications have changed a lot in scope
since, going from dedicated usage for forensic purposes
to the commercial applications for payment. They have
also changed a lot in scale, starting with limited number
of users and reasonably small databases (a few million people) in the 90's to much larger
systems today, with hundreds of millions of users like in the Indian UID project or in the
deployment on smartphones. The talk summarized how advances were made possible through
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technological improvements in the core areas of sensors and algorithms, but also in related
area like computer science, consumer electronics or systems architecture.
The second keynote was given by James Wayman (San Jose State
University, USA) about ten continuing issues in biometric
performance testing and reporting. The talk was closely related
to the genesis and future of the international standard ISO/IEC
19795-1 “Biometric Testing and Reporting – Part 1: Principles and
Framework” , which was created to present the requirements and
best scientific practices for conducting technical performance
testing. Eight years after adoption, this standard is now
undergoing an update. The standard is necessary because even a
short review of the technical literature on biometric device reveals
a wide variety of conflicting and contradictory testing protocols and thus reported test results
are difficult or impossible to compare. The root cause is that our understanding of automated
human recognition (“biometrics”) is fragmented at the deepest levels, even within single
organizations. The keynote explored the divisive issues that prevent test reports from being
“commensurate” in the sense of allowing technical performance results from two reports to be
compared in a meaningful way. Inspiring perspectives were presented specifically addressing
closed-set testing and "Rank k accuracy", testing from single session data, "confidence
intervals", attempts to determine the “probability of a match”, Equal Error Rates, and setting
thresholds to minimize loss functions.
Accepted conference contributions included 15
presentations covering fingerprint, vein, voice,
face, iris and periocular recognition and also
addressing new features extraction approaches
such as the Symmetry Assessment by Finite
Expansion (SAFE). Further contributions
discussed biometric template protection schemes
and identified further research needs to enhance
these schemes. Another relevant topic covered in
the conference presentations was the area of presentation attack detection and the resistance
of biometric sensors against spoofing. The poster session 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 –
providing lots of opportunities for networking.
On the last day of the conference Elham Tabassi from the US
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) addressed
quality measurement and how it can help improving biometric
system accuracy and efficiency during the capture process. Ten
years after NIST issued the first NIST Fingerprint Image Quality
(NFIQ) algorithm now the new NFIQ2.0 is close to its release and
currently tested on large scale datasets. NFIQ2.0 was developed
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by NIST and the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). The keynote talk
provided the preliminary findings of the NFIQ2.0 algorithm and highlighted the most recent
technical work regarding histogram-based measures that aligns the NFIQ2.0 with the evolution
of the ISO/IEC 29794-4 standard. NFIQ2.0 aims to satisfy the need of industry and operators of
mobile capture devices for a new quality assessment of fingerprint images. The new NFIQ2.0 is
again implemented as open‐source software with the intent to be used in large governmental
and commercial deployments such as the European VIS.
The last conference day concluded with an impressive keynote
by Ioannis Kakadiaris (University of Houston) presenting
biometrics research in the areas of 3D face (and ear)
recognition, 3D-aided 2D Face Recognition, 2D-2D Face
Recognition, and profile-based face recognition. He highlighted
the approaches that were developed to capture the details of an
individual’s face and to represent this 3D geometry information
in an efficient 2D structure and illustrated why the 3D-3D face
recognition software ranked first in the 3D-shape section of the 2007 Face Recognition Vendor
Test (FRVT) organized by NIST. He also highlighted the progress in addressing critical
challenges including low resolution data, indoor/outdoor illumination, accurate landmark and
pose estimation, cross-resolution matching, and score normalization.
As in previous BIOSIG conferences participants of the conference
themselves voted for the best paper and the best poster that was
presented at the conference. The winner of the BIOSIG 2014 best
paper award is Fieke Hillerström (The Hong Kong Polytechnic
University) for her presentation “Generating and Analyzing
Synthetic Finger-Vein Images”, which convinced the majority of
the participants.
While the poster session showed a good
number of impressive research results that
stimulated long discussions, there was one
contribution, which was not only in the
biometric content but also with regard to
presentation methodology very innovative
and outstanding. It was the interactive
gaming poster of Luuk Spreeuwers, which
received by far the most votes. Thus the BIOSIG 2014 best poster award was granted to Luuk
Spreeuwers (University of Twente) for his work “Fixed FAR Vote Fusion of Regional Facial
Classifiers“
The BIOSIG conference was preceded by the EAB Research Project Conference and was further
co-located with two satellite workshops: The meeting of the TeleTrusT Biometric Working
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Group and the EAB-COST-ACTION joint meeting on a “Strategic Agenda on Ethical,
Societal and Privacy Aspects of Biometric Technologies”.
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7. Impressum
Publisher: European Association for Biometrics Editors: Christian Rathgeb, Max Snijder Production: European Association for Biometrics Contact: [email protected] / [email protected] Phone: +31 624 603809 Web: www.eab.org