Past Events

Sagem mobiles introduced the fingerprints for mobile phones in 2010. The integrated fingerprint sensors on mobile phones have since inspired a wide variety of applications that include mobile banking. Despite the commercial success, the solutions were criticized in early stage for poor presentation attack detection algorithms. The subsequent generation of solutions have not only focused on the other biometric modalities such as face and ocular region, but have proposed better solutions for presentation attack detection and privacy protection. Today, a wide range of solutions are provided for presentation attack detection and privacy protection one can choose from.

This talk will present and discuss major milestones for biometrics on smartphones for banking applications. It will summarize the research achievements in the last decade, commercial success and few challenges to be addressed in near future. A particular focus will be given on approaches and solutions proposed within SWAN project (funded by Research Council of Norway) for various smartphone based biometric authentication in the light of banking applications.

Curriculum vitæ

Kiran Raja obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in 2016. He is faculty member at Dept. of Computer Science at NTNU, Norway. His main research interests include statistical pattern recognition, image processing, and machine learning with applications to biometrics, security and privacy protection. He was/is participating in EU projects INGRESS, SOTAMD, iMARS and other national projects such as SWAN. He has authored several papers in his field of interest and serves as a reviewer for number of journals and conferences. He is a member of EAB where he co-chairs the Academic Special Interest Group.

Algorithmic decision systems have frequently been labelled as “biased”, “racist”, “sexist”, “unfair” by numerous media outlets, organisations, and researchers. Are such assessments justified? Should citizens and policymakers be concerned? What is the current state of the research? How can variation across demographic groups be quantified in evaluations of such systems? These and other related matters have recently become a hot topic in the context of biometric technologies, which are ubiquitous in personal, commercial, and governmental applications. Biometrics represent an integral component of many surveillance, access control and operational identity management systems, thus directly or indirectly affecting billions of people all around the world.

The EAB organizes a series of virtual events with “Demographic fairness in biometric systems” as an overarching theme. The events will feature presentations by experts from academic, industry, and governmental organisations and will facilitate interactions and discussions between the experts and the audience.

The goal of the events is to raise awareness, define the problem and propose solutions and possible next steps.

A white paper will be published based on the outcomes of the virtual events.

GOLD sponsor of this event:

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Until about 2015, there was only one dominant fingerprint technology for law enforcement applications: Optical sensors based on total reflection. In recent years, many new technologies have entered the market and have enabled new applications for fingerprint acquisition. This presentation explains the technical basics of these technologies, compares them with each other, and gives an outlook on future trends and their challenges.

Curriculum vitæ

Dirk Morgeneier graduated with Master degrees in theoretical electrotechnics as well as image processing.

He is the co-founder of JENETRIC GmbH, the experts in digital fingerprint capturing. In his position as CEO, he has been responsible for developing new technologies and products since 2014, and is known as a successful technology influencer in the industry.

For more than 20 years Dirk has been working in the biometrics industry. His ideas and developments have shaped the market over the past two decades, with a proven track record for first-in-class products. He is the man behind the well-known tenprint scanner "Guardian" and pioneer of the 1000 ppi fingerprint and palm devices. The latest innovation: by using optical transparent TFT sensors to capture fingerprints, Dirk and his team have overcome the barriers of previous technologies.

Workshop of the Biometrics Working Group of TeleTrusT, the IT Security Association in Germany

Deeply-learned face representations enable the success of current face recognition systems. Despite the ability of these representations to encode the identity of an individual, recent works have shown that more information is stored within, such as demographics, image characteristics, and social traits. This talk will show that many more soft-biometric attributes are embedding in face templates and that these attributes often have a strong correlation on the face verification performance.

Curriculum vitæ

Philipp Terhörst completed his studies in physics at the Technical University of Darmstadt in 2017. Since then, he has been working in the Smart Living & Biometric Technologies department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research (IGD) as a researcher. His research interest includes research at machine learning and biometric solutions focusing on quality assessment, privacy-enhancement, and bias-mitigation in face recognition. He is author of several publications in conferences and journals such as CVPR and IEEE Access and is regularly serving as a reviewer (e.g. for TPAMI, TIP, PR, BTAS, ICB). For his scientific work, he received several awards such as the EAB Biometrics Industry Award 2020 from the European Association for Biometrics for his dissertation or the IJCB 2020 Qualcomm PC Chairs Choice Best Student Paper Award. Moreover, he was involved in the Software Campus program, a management program of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Ten years back in spring 2011 our Norwegian Biometrics Laboratory (NBL) was established and for the opening we organized a workshop. Since then we have celebrated the NBL Annual Workshops (NBLAW). All the workshops are listed on the NBL homepage.

Our 10 years celebration will have a modest character due to the ongoing COVID-19 situation. But nevertheless we would like to (virtually) spend the day together with our friends and inform the public about the research that we conduct. Thus the theme of the NBLAW-2021 is "Face Morphing Attack Detection".

Widespread deployment of Automatic Border Control (ABC), along with electronic Machine Readable Travel Documents (eMRTD) for person verification, has enabled a prominent use case of face biometrics in border control applications. The trust anchor are biometric passports. Many countries issue eMRTD passports on the basis of a printed biometric face photo submitted by the applicant, a procedure which allows the possibility of the photo being either altered to beautify the subject’s appearance or morphed to conceal his/her identity. If an eMRTD passport is issued with a morphed facial image, two or more data subjects can then use it to pass a border control. This workshop will present discuss the morphing attack problem and indicate early solutions to detect such morphed facial images.

All times refer to CET.

In its first part the presentation will cover the increasing usage of live enrolment for German ID cards and passport since 2012: although live enrolment has not been made mandatory in Germany for a long time, Speed Biometrics GmbH has equipped over 100 local authorities (including more than 40 % of all large cities) in 11 federal states with over 180 Speed Capture systems during recent years.

The second part will deal with the attempt of the German Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community to make live enrolment mandatory and the resulting final law adopted by the German Bundestag end of 2020 (defining a dual approach allowing the applications to choose between a passport photo captured and transferred digitally by photographer and using live enrolment equipment at the authority where available).

The third part of the presentation will be dedicated to the (possible) consequences - challenges and chances - arising from the aforementioned law becoming effective 2025.

Curriculum vitæ

Stefan Pahmeier has been heading the realization of Speed Capture as the first live enrolment solution for German ID cards and passports. He has become managing director of Speed Biometrics in 2015. As such he is continuously working on improving the current solution to meet evolving technical requirements as well as customer demands. He has followed the legislative procedure resulting in the above mentioned law very closely.

The presentation will deal with the methods of fingerprinting, digitization and processing for the creation of fake fingerprints (PAD), the extraction of features (minutiae) and their use for generating synthetic fingerprints, including damage simulation. Last but not least, the fingerprint damage detection and its origin and overall quality estimation of the fingerprint will be mentioned.

Curriculum vitæ

Prof. Martin Drahansky graduated in 2001 from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science BUT and simultaneously from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. His Ph.D. thesis was focused on generating cryptographic keys from fingerprints, which he defended in 2005 at the Faculty of Information Technology BUT. In 2017 he was promoted to full professor. He worked from 2002 to 2005 at the University of Siegen, Institute of Measurement Technology (Germany) and also collaborated with the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD in Darmstadt (Germany). In 2014, he went on sabbatical to the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan) for half a year. In recent years, he has focused on areas related to biometric systems – processing of images and videos, sensoric systems (including embedded systems and robotics) and IT security. During his leisure activities he practices judo, mountain bike, via ferratas, fitness and mineralogy plus entomology.

The team of the Department of Multimedia Systems of the Gdańsk University of Technology in Poland has been working with the largest Polish bank in the field of biometrics since 2015. They have constructed an experimental multimodal biometric workstation replicated in 100 copies and installed in 60 branches of this bank. This workstation allowed them to conduct a large experiment in which they investigated the usability of different banking biometric modalities. The biometric system includes a biometric pen the team constructed to verify handwritten signatures, a camera and their proprietary facial recognition software, a microphone that works with an artificial neural network to verify the speaker, and a hand-vein sensor.

The team at GUT involved over 150 bank advisors and nearly 10.000 bank customers in the experiment. Also, they used surveys to gather opinions on the usefulness of the different types of biometrics. They have currently constructed an upgraded testbed, which has been extended with a scanner of ID documents and a gaze tracker, enabling contactless control of the whole biometric authentication process, and it also provides yet another biometric modality based on the analysis of saccadic movements.

In their video footage presentation, Prof. Czyżewski will talk about their construction work, research, results, and work in progress.

Curriculum vitæ

Prof. Andrzej Czyżewski is the Head of the Department of Multimedia Systems of the Gdańsk University of Technology in Poland. His scientific interests focus on multimedia techniques and their numerous interdisciplinary applications for telemedicine, traffic control, smart cities, biometrics, and others.

Prof. Czyżewski lectures at the Gdańsk University of Technology on "Multimedia technologies" and "Sound and image engineering." He cooperates with, among others with the Medical University of Gdańsk and with some large international corporations, with the PKO Bank, with the General Directorate of National Roads and Motorways, and with many smaller enterprises in which he and his team implement inventions and innovations being developed. He is the author of over 600 scientific publications and nearly 30 patents. He has so far promoted 13 doctors (Ph.D.) and over 300 masters of science (M.Sc.) and engineers.

This talk will cover the iris presentation attack detection. With a backbone based on two survey papers on this topic recently co-authored by Czajka (published in ACM Computing Surveys, 2018 and in Pattern Recognition Letters, 2020), Czajka will primarily discuss the problem of recognition of unknown attack types (unseen during training), or less popular attack types (such as cadaver eyes), and will bring a few ideas of making the iris PAD algorithms more attack type-agnostic. A short summary of available iris PAD datasets, open-source iris PAD solutions, and the performance in an open-set classification regime observed in the fourth edition of LivDet-Iris competition (concluded in 2020) will be delivered.

Curriculum vitæ

Adam Czajka is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. His research focuses on biometrics and security, especially on human-driven methods of detecting unknown types of presentation attacks driving a biometric system into incorrect decision. In general, he is fascinated by wide spectrum of research topics in computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning. Recently, he has been exploring the use of visual signals generated by artificial neural networks in stimulation of emotions and mental healing processes. In the classroom, he enjoys teaching graduate- and undergraduate-level Computer Vision (CSE 40535/60535/40536/60536), Biometrics (CSE 40537/60537) and Neural Networks (CSE 40868/60868) courses.

Czajka is originally from Poland. He received M.Sc. in Computer Control Systems (hons), Ph.D. in Biometrics (hons) and D.Sc. degree ("habilitation") in Computer Science, all from Warsaw University of Technology (WUT). Before coming to Notre Dame, he was the Chair and co-founder of the Biometrics and Machine Learning Laboratory in the Institute of Control and Computation Engineering at WUT, the Head of the Postgraduate Studies on Security and Biometrics, the Vice Chair of the NASK Biometrics Laboratory, and the Chair of the Polish Standardization Committee on Biometrics. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, an active member of the EAB, an associate member of the IAI and an expert of ISO/IEC Sub-Committee 37 on Biometrics.

The xAI4Biometrics Workshop aims at promoting a better understanding, through explainability and interpretability, of currently common and accepted practices in several and varied applications of biometrics. These applications, in scenarios comprising identity verification for access/border control, watching lists surveillance, anti-spoofing measures embedded in biometric recognition systems, forensic applications, among many others, affect the daily life of an ever-growing population.

The xAI4Biometrics Workshop @ WACV 2021 will include five oral paper presentations and two keynote talks:

• "Explaining Deep Neural Network Decisions for Enhanced Biometric Systems" by Prof. Peter Eisert (Humboldt University Berlin and Fraunhofer HH)
• "At the Two Extremes of Interpretability in Machine Learning: Very Sparse Models and Interpretable Deep Neural Networks" by Prof. Cynthia Rudin (Duke University).

You are still on time to register and remotely attend, not only the workshop but also the WACV2021 conference for a very affordable fee.