European Biometrics Awards 2021

On 15 September 2021 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 in a virtual meeting.

European Biometric Max Snijder Award

The EAB Max Snijder Award is granted to a researcher, who expressed through his work a wider perspective to get a broader picture on biometric applications. The winner of this award is Žiga Emeršič, who conducted his PhD project at University of Ljubljana (Slovenia), and presented the topic of Constellation-Based Deep Ear Recognition. In his work he proposed an alternative solution to the design of deep recognition models that encode both global as well as local image characteristics and generate descriptive image representations. The proposed model is designed as dual-path convolutional neural network, where one path processes the input holistically, whereas the second captures local images characteristics from image patches sampled from the input image. A novel pooling operation, called patch-relevant-information pooling, is also proposed and integrated into the proposed model. The pooling operation helps to select features from the input patches that are locally relevant and to focus the attention of the network to image regions that are descriptive and important for representation purposes. The wider perspective is related to the COVID-19 pandemic, which emphasized the need for multimodal recognition approaches when dealing with masked faces. Incorporating an ear recognition system into a larger recognition system can greatly improve accuracy. In addition, ear recognition can be used as a standalone application or a mobile add-on for device security.

With his outstanding presentation during the introduction to their works, Žiga Emeršič was also awarded the Best Presentation Award.

European Biometric Industry Award

This year the European Biometrics Industry Award goes to Pawel Drozdowski from Hochschule Darmstadt (Germany)/NTNU (Norway) for his work Efficient privacy-preserving biometric identification in large-scale multibiometric systems. The work addresses several areas of research which have not previously been considered in the literature. It couples the methods of computational workload reduction with additional relevant constraints or extensions, such as being modality-agnostic, working prior to feature extraction, utilising information fusion, and integrating biometric template protection. In several cases, the proposed methods have been among the first ones in their respective areas published in the scientific literature. The achieved results are very promising in terms of objective evaluation metrics.