Ocular biometrics has achieved rapid scientific growth in the last decades, with many complete proposed systems based on a variety of ocular traits available (iris pattern, sclera vessel pattern, retina pattern, and periocular regions). The ocular trait is proved to be promising and therefore has received significant attention from researchers from industry, academia as well as government. The major reason behind the popularity of the ocular trait is due to the iris pattern. In the seminal work on iris biometrics, Near Infra-red (NIR) was used for iris recognition.  In the subsequent phase of the literature, iris biometrics in the visible spectrum was explored.  The retina is next ocular trait researched in the literature.  In the very recent literature, two new traits namely conjunctival vasculature (sclera) and peri-ocular are proposed.

Still, there are various open, unexplored, and unidentified challenges in ocular biometrics. Moreover, area of research is a fundamental problem in biometrics with broad economic (upcoming market growth of biometrics will enjoy annual growth rate of over 150%, more demand of ocular biometrics), social (secure mobile banking applications, secure surveillance, forensics applications, border control, etc.), scientific impact, etc. (development of detection, segmentation, characterization, identification algorithm in computer vision among others).

Therefore, this subject of research should receive more multidisciplinary effort from signal processing, pattern recognition, machine learning, and information fusion domain. Organising dedicated workshop, specials session can be helpful to attend multidisciplinary effort. Incidentally, no such event has been organising in the recent course of time. Consequently, due to the overwhelming success of a recent special session hosted on Ocular Biometrics on Visible Spectrum (OBVS 17) in conjunction with IJCB 2017, we plan to host this a special session with a wider scope to push forward and document the recent advancement in ocular biometric as a whole. Therefore, the goal of this special session is to bring together researchers and practitioners working in this area of biometrics and to address a wide range of theoretical and practical issues related to systems based on this subject and record the recent advancements on ocular biometrics.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Ocular biometrics in different spectrums (NIR, visible, etc.)
• Ocular biometrics at a distance and in the wild
• Ocular biometrics for forensic applications
• Biomedical application of ocular biometrics
• Ocular biometrics in mobile environments
• Segmentation, enhancement issues of ocular biometrics
• Information fusion of ocular biometrics
• Liveness of ocular biometrics 
• Adaptability of ocular biometrics

Key dates are:
Papers submission due: 7 November 2017
Authors are notified of decision: 7 December 2017
Camera ready submission: 15 December 2017

Submission Instructions:
Papers will be submitted through the following link: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICB2018/Submission/Index
Manuscripts should follow main conference’s length and formatting guidelines.

Organizers:
Abhijit Das, University Technology Sydney, Australia;
Umapada Pal, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India;
Michael Blumenstein, University Technology Sydney, Australia
Miguel A. Ferrer ULPGC, Spain