The availability of common benchmark databases, together with evaluation protocols has been partly responsible for the significant gains made in biometrics in recent years. We believe that such evaluations should be continued. Databases and, more importantly, unbiased evaluation mechanisms should be spread across the scientific community, making it possible for scientists to evaluate their progress.

The 6th IAPR International Conference on Biometrics (ICB 2013) is supporting the organization of the following 8 evaluations:
» The 2nd competition on counter measures to 2D facial spoofing attacks
» Competition on face recognition in mobile environment using the MOBIO database
» Competition on speaker recognition in mobile environment using the MOBIO database
» The First ICB Competition on Face Recognition (ICFR2013)
» The First ICB Competition on Iris Recognition (ICIR2013)
» Competition on Secure Template Fingerprint Verification (STFV@ICB-2013)
» Competition on Fingerprint Indexing (FIDX@ICB-2013)
» Competition on Fingerprint Liveness Detection

Competitions will be running from January 7, 2013 to March 22, 2013, but database and instructions will be available in late 2012. Each competition will have the opportunity to submit for review a competition summary paper for possible publication into the official proceedings.

Together with these 8 evaluations, an on-site spoofing challenge intended to evaluate operational vulnerabilities of various biometric systems will be conducted:
» TABULA RASA Spoofing Challenge. [NEW!]

• Registration to competitions: December 2012
• Data and protocols available: January 2013
• Submission of results: late March 2013

Sébastien Marcel, Idiap research institute (Switzerland)
Raffaele Cappelli, University of Bologna (Italy)
Zhenan Sun, Chinese Academy of Sciences (China)