Upcoming Events

From the early days, when security was the driving force behind biometric research, today's challenges go far beyond security. Machine learning, Image understanding, Signal analysis, Neuroscience, Robotics, Forensic science, Digital forensics and other disciplines, converged in a truly multidisciplinary effort to devise and build advanced systems to facilitate the interpretation of signals recorded from individuals acting in a given environment. This is what we simply call today "Biometrics".

What are the most up-to-date core biometric technologies developed in the field? What is the potential impact of biometrics in forensic investigation and crime prevention? What can we learn from human perception? How to deploy current Deep Learning approaches? How to deal with adversarial attacks in biometric recognition?

This school follows the successful track of the International Summer Schools on Biometrics held since 2003. In this 17^th edition, the courses will mainly focus on new and emerging issues:

• Biometrics for social interactions and emerging applications;
• How to exploit new biometric technologies in forensic and security applications;
• Evaluation and assessment of biometric and forensic applications;
• Deep Learning for biometrics, forensic identification and Identity Science.

The courses will provide a clear and in-depth picture on the state-of-the-art in biometric verification/identification technology, both under the theoretical and scientific point of view as well as in diverse application domains.

The lectures will be given by 18 outstanding experts in the field, from both academia and industry.

An advanced feature of this summer school will be some practical sessions to better understand, "hands on", the real potential of today's biometric technologies.

Recent discussions on privacy protection, for instance within the framework of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), has raised privacy concerns regarding the storage and use of biometric data. The international standard ISO/IEC 24745 has established two main requirements for protecting biometric templates i) irreversibility and ii) unlinkability back in 2011. Since then, numerous efforts have been directed to the development and analysis of irreversible templates. However, until recently, a systematic quantitative manner to analyse the unlinkability of such templates was proposed. As a consequence, the lack of a unified framework to analyse all privacy aspects of biometric template protection schemes may have hindered their further deployment.

In this presentation, we will focus on the objective and quantitative evaluation of biometric template protection schemes. To that end, the main concepts related to template protection will be introduced, together with a review of the main existing approaches. A unified framework for the evaluation and benchmarking will be subsequently described, including the recently proposed unlinkability metric and some practical examples.

Curriculum vitæ

Marta Gomez-Barrero is a Professor for IT-Security and technical data privacy at the Hochschule Ansbach, in Germany. Between 2016 and 2020, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the National Research Center for Applied Cybersecurity (ATHENE) - Hochschule Darmstadt, Germany. Before that, she received her MSc degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics (2011), and her PhD degree in Electrical Engineering (2016), all from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain.

Her current research focuses on security and privacy evaluations of biometric systems, Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) methodologies, and biometric template protection (BTP) schemes. She has co-authored more than 70 publications, chaired special sessions and competitions at international conferences, she is associate editor for the EURASIP Journal on Information Security, and represents the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) in ISO/IEC SC37 JTC1 SC37 on biometrics. She has also received a number of distinctions, including: EAB European Biometric Industry Award 2015, Best Ph.D. Thesis Award by Universidad Autonoma de Madrid 2015/16, Siew-Sngiem Best Paper Award at ICB 2015, Archimedes Award for young researches from Spanish MECD, and Best Poster Award at ICB 2013.

"Garbage In, Garbage Out". The well-known computer science GIGO principle summarises in a very efficient and graphic manner, the pivotal role played by the soundness of the data given as input to any computerised system, in the meaningfulness of the output results. As in any other area of science, only nonsense conclusions can be expected from flawed premises. And automated biometric systems are no exception to this rule.

The current webinar will deepen into how the estimation of biometric quality and quality metrics can help to avoid the GIGO principle, how it can be measured, how can quality metrics be evaluated, and their multiple applications in biometrics.

Curriculum vitæ

Javier Galbally received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Universidad de Cantabria, Spain, in 2005, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, in 2009, where he was an Assistant Professor until 2012. In 2013, he joined the European Commission in DG Joint Research Centre, where he is currently a Scientific/Technical Officer. His research interests are mainly focused on the security and performance evaluation of biometric systems, pattern and biometric recognition. He is actively involved in different European projects dealing with biometrics and their use in large IT systems. He is the Chair of the EAB Research Projects Conference and has authored over 100 publications mainly focused on the biometrics field.

Finger-vein, or finger vascular pattern recognition is an upcoming form biometric recognition that combines a good recognition performance with an inherent robustness against presentation attacks in the sense that it does not leave traces. The first step in the recognition process is the acquisition of a gray-scale image in which the vascular pattern is visible as dark lines. From this image relevant features are extracted for recognition. In this webinar recent work at the University of Twente will be described in which a physical model of the finger was developed. The purpose of that model is to better understand the imaging process of finger vascular patterns, leading on the longer term to better sensors and improved recognition performance. The first results give new insights in the role of soft tissue, bone and joints in the imaging process. Based on the model the group developed finger phantoms that can be used to support the development of sensors and that can provide ground truth for finger-vein detection.

Curriculum vitæ

Prof. Dr. Raymond Veldhuis is a full professor of Biometric Pattern Recognition at the University of Twente, where he leads the Data Management and Biometrics group. His main research topics are face recognition, fingerprint recognition, vascular pattern recognition, multibiometrics, and biometric template protection. The research is both applied and fundamental. Raymond Veldhuis is Editor of IEEE TIFS and chairman of the EAB Special Interest Group Academia. He has been involved in numerous national and EU projects on biometrics, of which the ITN PriMa (Privacy Matters) is the most recent. Raymond Veldhuis teaches analogue and digital signal processing as well as biometrics and pattern recognition.

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

The 7^th edition of the EAB Research Projects Conference will take place as virtual conference from 14 to 16 September 2020. The conference is organized by the European Association on Biometrics (EAB) in cooperation with the Joint Research Center (DG JRC) of the European Commission, through its Cyber and Digital Citizens’ security Unit. The EAB-RPC 2020 will be co-located with the EAB Biometrics Research, Industry and Max-Snijder-Awards and the IEEE BIOSIG Conference, later that same week.

The conference is currently the largest event on research funded by the European Union in the area of Biometrics and Identity Management. Over the previous successful editions, EAB-RPC has become the main forum in Europe where attendees can simultaneously: promote research carried out in biometrics, forge new links and networks, and identify the appropriate partners for possible future project applications. Last year’s edition welcomed over 100 participants from academia, industry and public institutions.

We thank our partners:

All members of EAB are invited to join us for our annual General Assembly and elect the Supervisory Board for the next term of office of three years.

EAB is launching the fourteenth European BiometrMax Snijder, Research, and Industry Awards. These prestigious 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 European Association for Biometrics is pleased to announce the launch of its Biometrics Training Event which will be held on the 17^th and 18^th September 2020 at the Fraunhofer IGD, Darmstadt, Germany, running in parallel with BIOSIG 2020.

The event aims to provide an opportunity to learn first-hand from world-leading experts both the basics of biometric systems and also the latest developments across the community. It is aimed at a wide range of stakeholders including industrial and governmental developers and end-users, researchers, academics and post-graduate students, and policy makers.

The conference is focused on all technical factors affecting the deployment and use of high performance face recognition applications, including applications, standards, advanced and rapid capture, quality assessment, age and ageing effects, demographic effects, presentation attack detection, non-cooperative uses, accuracy measurement and performance tests.

The Norwegian Biometrics Forum (NBF) is an open platform dedicated to regular exchange of information and experience related to the field of Biometrics. The target of the group is the interdisciplinary discussion between research, technology developers, data privacy experts, governmental agencies and operators of Biometric Systems. In the regular meetings new applications, latest research results and products are presented.

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

IWBF is an international forum devoted to facilitating synergies in research and development among the areas of multimedia forensics, forensic biometrics, and forensic science. State-of-the-art research in areas such as biometrics, forensic science, surveillance, and multimedia forensics will be presented. The 9th edition of IWBF will be a meeting place for those concerned with the use of advanced biometric technologies in forensic applications, attracting participants from industry, research, academia, and end-users.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Biometrics
• Attacks to biometric recognition systems
• Multimodal biometrics
• Soft biometrics
• Mobile biometrics
• Biometric analysis of crime scenes
• Forensic Science
• Multimedia forensics
• Integrity verification
• Anonymization & Data Privacy
• Data de-identification
• Surveillance
• Ethical and societal implications
• Information Theoretic Security
• Adversarial Signal Processing
• Case studies on the aforementioned topics

Believe me, this is just a test!