2023 EAB Biometrics Awards

European Biometrics Max Snijder Award

In this thesis titled Representation and Metric Learning Advances for Deep Neural Network Face and Speaker Biometric Systems, Victoria Mingote Bueno presented different alternative approaches to deal with these issues. First, she focused her efforts on improving the generation of signal representations, also known as representation learning, for the text-dependent speaker verification task, since this task has a strong dependency on the phonetic content. In the second part of her thesis, she analyzed the fact that the verification systems available in the state-of-the-art are not always optimized towards the goal task. Hence, she proposed several approaches using new training loss functions that are based on the final verification metrics such as Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC), Detection Cost Function (aDCF) and Cost of Log-Likelihood Ratio (CLLR). These training loss functions were applied successfully for face and speaker verification tasks and also for language recognition. The results of the research aims to improve the generation of signal representation for text-dependent speaker verification task which allows to verification of a speaker's identity more accurately when a specific text prompt is provided.

Winner of the Max-Snijder-Award Victoria Mingote Bueno together with EAB chair Frøy Løvåsdal

European Biometrics Industry Award

This year the European Biometrics Award goes to Blaž Meden from the University of Ljubljana for his research paper Face deidentification with controllable privacy protection. His research emphasizes on how facial images have become a crucial concern when it comes to privacy protection in today's digital age and how various face deidentification techniques are used to protect an individual's privacy. The research underlines the various drawbacks that today's face deidentification techniques have and addresses these shortcomings with a novel controllable face deidentification technique that balances image quality, identity protection, and data utility for further analysis. The results of the research reveal that shows that the proposed solution offers a considerable level of identity protection, encourages overall performance, promises valuable preservation of data utility and sufficient diversity among the deidentified faces.

Winner of the EAB Industry Award Blaž Meden together with jury member and sponsor Amaanie Hakim from IDEMIA

European Biometrics Research Award

The European Biometrics Research Award 2023 was granted to Hatef Otroshi Shahreza who is a Ph.D. student from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne for his work Measuring Linkability of Protected Biometric Templates Using Maximal Leakage.

Mr. Otroshi Shahreza is also a research assistant with the Biometrics Security and Privacy Group, Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland. His work emphasizes the growing use of biometric recognition systems and the need to secure these systems. This research paper highlights the lack of scholarly literature on how to measure the linkability of biometric templates using information-theoric methods with a practical interpretation. The paper proposes a new method for measuring the linkability of protected biometric templates based on maximal leakage and has an appealing operational interpretation. The proposed method is generic and was used to evaluate the linkability of biometric templates from different biometric characteristics (face, voice, and finger vein) protected with different template protection methods. This measure is proposed based on the definition of unlinkability in the ISO standard and can potentially be considered as a standardized method of evaluating unlinkability in protected biometric systems.

Winner of the EAB Research Award Hatef Otroshi Shahreza with awards chair Patrizio Campisi

The presentation award was awarded to both Dr. Hatef Otroshi Shahreza and Dr. Blaž Meden.

The EAB awards have a total value of €4.000,00 which is divided amongst the winners. The finalists are also donated a free of charge one-year membership of EAB. The awards were kindly co-sponsored by IDEMIA.

The selection of the EAB awards 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 winners of the Industry and Max Snijder Awards. Criteria for the Industry Award are next to the scientific level the novelty, impact, applicability and other business aspects. The 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 EAB Biometrics Awards are granted annually to individuals who make a significant contribution to the field of biometrics research in Europe. The intention of the awards is to stimulate and promote innovation and research in the field of Identity and Biometrics in Europe.

The call for submissions for the European Biometrics Max Snijder, Research, and Industry Awards 2024 is available at eab.org/award