2023 EAB Biometrics Awards

European Biometrics Max Snijder Award

Pedro David Carneiro Neto, from the University of Porto (Portugal), was the winner of the Max Snijder Award for his paper PIC-Score: Probabilistic Interpretable Comparison Score for Optimal Matching Confidence. In short, Carneiro Neto's research proposes a scoring system that accurately reflects the probability that an identity matching decision is correct and originates from samples of the same identity. Thus, this system attains greater reliability and accuracy than previous techniques of biometric confidence estimation. At present, such techniques can easily differentiate between high and low confidence, but lack interpretability, which is of particular importance in critical decision-making contexts requiring explainability (i.e., forensic investigations). Carneiro Neto's results demonstrate that the PIC-Score has a significantly more accurate, stable, and interpretable probabilistic interpretation. In addition, the score can optimally combine multiple samples from the same network without losing probabilistic interpretability to further increase its recognition and confidence estimation performance. It can moreover be applied in multi-biometric recognition scenarios. All in all, Carneiro Neto's work jointly attains interpretability, optimality, universality, combinability, and integrability.

Winner of the Max-Snijder-Award Pedro Carneiro Neto together with Chairman of the Award Committee Prof. Patrizio Campisi and Chairperson of the European Association for Biometrics Frøy Løvåsdal.

European Biometrics Research Award

This year's Research Award went to Peter Rot from the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia) for the paper ASPECD: Adaptable Soft-Biometric Privacy–Enhancement Using Centroid Decoding for Face Verification. In his work, Rot introduces a novel technique for privacy enhancement of soft biometrics (i.e. gender, ethnicity, age) in the context of face recognition. ASPECD can selectively suppress categorical and binary information based on users' privacy preferences, thus alleviating privacy-related risks of non-consensual extraction and misuse. At the same time, Rot's framework produces privacy-enhanced temples that are directly comparable to those in the original embedding space and maintain a high degree of identity matching accuracy, all while increasing trustworthiness. The research therefore attains a competitive privacy-utility trade-off compared to state-of-the-art methods in scenarios involving privacy-enhancement vis-à-vis gender and ethnicity attributes. Moreover, the research addresses an important gap in the Soft-Biometric Privacy-Enhancing Techniques literature.

In addition, Peter Rot was the winner of the Best Presentation Award.

Winner of the EAB Research Award Peter Rot together with Chairman of the Award Committee Prof. Patrizio Campisi and Chairperson of the European Association for Biometrics Frøy Løvåsdal

European Biometrics Industry Award

The winner of the Industry Award was Amina Bassit, from the University of Twente (Netherlands), for her Ph.D. dissertation Fast and Accurate Biometric Search under Encryption. In her work, Bassit follows a systematic approach to construct a biometric solution that transforms the usual similarity score functions of biometric comparators into lookup table-based comparators, thus facilitating their integration with encrypted biometric databases. As such, this innovative solution successfully attains an efficient and accurate performance of biometric verification and search under encryption for data represented as vectors that is secure against semi-honest attackers. Moreover, the recognition solution is parallelisable and does not require any pre-selection or dimensionality reduction techniques. The result is an optimal trade-off between privacy, security, efficiency, and accuracy, leading to more responsible and practical biometric recognition. The research outperforms state-of-the-art by more than two orders of magnitude, being at least 246 times faster. Thus, Bassit's search solution is the first biometric recognition solution to satisfy the 10s NIST-FRVT limit under encryption for a one-in-a-million biometric search, without biometric leakage and an accuracy improvement of at least 4.6% FNIR for a fixed FPIR at 0.1%.

Winner of the EAB Industry Amina Bassit together with Chairman of the Award Committee Prof. Patrizio Campisi and Chairperson of the European Association for Biometrics Frøy Løvåsdal.

The European Biometrics Awards have a total value of €4.000,00, which is divided amongst the winners. The finalists are also awarded a complimentary one-year membership to the EAB. This year's Industry Award was kindly sponsored by IDEMIA.

The selection of the Research Award is made on the basis of academic and scientific quality of the submitted works as well as the quality of the presentations. A separate selection is made during the final presentation to appoint the winners of the Industry and Max Snijder Awards. Next to its scientific quality, the criteria for the Industry Award considers the novelty, impact, applicability and other business aspects of the submitted works.

The European Biometrics Awards are granted annually to individuals who make a significant contribution to the field of biometrics research in Europe. Their goal is to stimulate and promote innovation and research in the field of Identity and Biometrics in Europe.

EAB members can find the summaries of the theses of the winners in the Hall of Fame.

The call for submissions for the European Biometrics Max Snijder, Research, and Industry Awards 2025 has been published and is available at eab.org/award.