European Biometrics Awards 2019
On 18 September 2019 the European Association for Biometrics (EAB) awarded young researchers for their outstanding works in the area of biometrics. An international jury chose 3 candidates out of a broad range of submitted high quality papers to present their significant contribution in front of the jury, the EAB members and the public audience.
![[Photo] Jury member Prof Raymond Veldhuis, Arthur Snijder, Carine Wouters, Caspar Snijder, the award winner Dr Klemen Grm together with the EAB chairman Alexander Nouak and the EAB award chair Prof Patrizio Campisi](/images/photos/award2019/2019-eab_award-klemen_grm-snijder_family.jpg "Jury member Prof Raymond Veldhuis, Arthur Snijder, Carine Wouters, Caspar Snijder, the award winner Dr Klemen Grm together with the EAB chairman Alexander Nouak and the EAB award chair Prof Patrizio Campisi")
Jury member Prof Raymond Veldhuis, Arthur Snijder, Carine Wouters, Caspar Snijder, the award winner Klemen Grm together with the EAB chairman Alexander Nouak and the EAB award chair Prof Patrizio Campisi
European Biometric Max Snijder Award
In 2019 for the first time the EAB Max Snijder Award was announced in memory of the EAB founder and managing director, who also initiated the European Research Awards back in 2006. The Max Snijder Award is granted to a researcher, who through his work expressed a wider perspective to get a broader picture on biometric applications.
The very first winner of this award is Dr Klemen Grm from the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), who presented his PhD thesis Super-resolution for automated face recognition from low-resolution imagery. In his work he combines a novel multi-scale image restoration loss function based on the structural similarity index with identity priors based on pre-trained face recognition models to train a cascaded super-resolution network for the task of upsampling face images. This is helpful for face recognition and may other application.
![[Photo] Winner of the EAB Industry Award 2019: Dr Patrick Schuch](/images/photos/award2019/2019-eab_award-schuch.jpg "Winner of the EAB Industry Award 2019: Dr Patrick Schuch")
Winner of the EAB Industry Award 2019: Dr Patrick Schuch
European Biometric Industry Award
This year the European Biometrics Industry Award goes to Dr Patrick Schuch from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Gjøvik)/Dermalog (Hamburg) for the thesis titled Deep Learning for Fingerprint Recognition Systems. During the final he focused in his presentation on the aspect of learning neighborhoods for fingerprint indexing. The proposed approach is using Deep Learning to learn fingerprint indices from ISO/IEC minutia templates. Very compact index vectors are learned: 16 float values per sample. This allows extremely fast biometric comparison. The approach was tested at independent benchmark framework FVC-ongoing. For some aspects, this approach outperforms state of the art Minutia Cylinder Code.
European Biometric Research Award
The European Biometrics Research Award 2019 was granted to Tiago de Freitas Pereira from Idiap (Martigny)/EPFL (Lausanne) for his PhD-thesis Learning How to Recognize Faces in Heterogeneous Environments
The task of Heterogeneous Face Recognition consists in comparing face images that are captured in different domains, such as sketches to photographs (visual spectra images), thermal images to photographs or near-infrared images to photographs. In his work he suggests that high level features in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks trained on visual spectra images are potentially domain independent and can be used to encode faces sensed in different image domains. A generic framework for Heterogeneous Face Recognition is proposed by adapting Deep Convolutional Neural Networks low level features in, so called, Domain Specific Units. The adaptation using Domain Specific Units allows the learning of shallow feature detectors specific for each new image domain. Furthermore, it handles its transformation to a generic face space shared between all image domains. Experiments carried out with different face databases covering different image domains show substantial improvements in terms of recognition rate.
![[Photo] Winner of the EAB Research Award 2019: Tiago de Freitas Pereira](/images/photos/award2019/2019-eab_award-freitas_pereira.jpg "Winner of the EAB Research Award 2019: Tiago de Freitas Pereira")
Winner of the EAB Research Award 2019: Tiago de Freitas Pereira
The European Biometrics Max Snijder, Research, and Industry Awards have in total a value of 4.000,00 € stipendium, which is divided amongst the winners. The finalists are also donated a free of charge one year membership of EAB. The European Biometric Research and Industry Awards 2018 are kindly sponsored by IDEMIA and mymarq.
The selection for the research award has been made on the basis of the academic and scientific quality of the submitted works as well as on the quality of their presentations. A separate selection was made during the final presentation in order to appoint the winner of the industry award. Criteria for this award are next to the scientific level the novelty, impact, applicability and other business aspects.
The European Biometrics Max Snijder, Research, and Industry Awards are granted annually to individuals who have been judged by a panel of internationally respected experts to be making a significant contribution to the field of biometrics research in Europe. The intention of the award is to stimulate and promote innovation and research in the field of Identity and Biometrics in Europe.
![[Photo] The winners of the European Biometrics Max Snijder, Research, and Industry Awards 2019 Patrick Schuch, Klemen Grm and Tiago de Freitas Pereira together with Claude Bauzou (IDEMIA), Vitomir Struc (University of Ljubljana), Marianne Volonte (mymarc), Raymond Veldhuis (University of Twente), Tom Kevenaar (GenKey), Patrizio Campisi (University University of Roma TRE), Christoph Busch (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and Alexander Nouak (EAB chair)](/images/photos/award2019/2019-eab_awards-winners+jury+sponsors.jpg "The winners of the European Biometrics Max Snijder, Research, and Industry Awards 2019 Patrick Schuch, Klemen Grm and Tiago de Freitas Pereira together with Claude Bauzou (IDEMIA), Vitomir Struc (University of Ljubljana), Marianne Volonte (mymarc), Raymond Veldhuis (University of Twente), Tom Kevenaar (GenKey), Patrizio Campisi (University University of Roma TRE), Christoph Busch (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and Alexander Nouak (EAB chair)")
The winners of the European Biometrics Max Snijder, Research, and Industry Awards 2019 Patrick Schuch, Klemen Grm and Tiago de Freitas Pereira together with Claude Bauzou (IDEMIA), Vitomir Struc (University of Ljubljana), Marianne Volonte (mymarc), Raymond Veldhuis (University of Twente), Tom Kevenaar (GenKey), Patrizio Campisi (University University of Roma TRE), Christoph Busch (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) and Alexander Nouak (EAB chair)
EAB members can find the thesis of the award winners in the Hall of Fame
The call for submissions for the EAB European Biometrics Awards 2020 is already available.
