In our global information society, there is an ever-growing need to authenticate individuals. Biometrics is emerging as a reliable method that can overcome some of the limitations of the traditional automatic personal identification technologies. Automated biometrics deal with physiological and/or behavioral characteristics, such as a fingerprint, signature, palm print, iris, hand, voice or face, which can be used to authenticate a person's claim to a certain identity or establish a person's identity from a large database. With the rapid technological advances in electronics and Internet commerce and with the increased emphasis on security, there will be a growing need for secure transaction processing using biometrics technology.

 

The purpose of this conference was to emphasize the design and development of efficient and effective biometric technologies and systems; provide an international forum for researchers, engineers and vendors from different disciplines to exchange ideas; identify problems; evaluate system performance; explore new research directions; and initiate possible collaborative research and future system developments. The ICB series of conferences will significantly benefit biometric researchers in academic, government and industrial sectors.

 

The International Conference on Biometric Authentication (ICBA 2004) was the first major gathering in the Asia-Pacific region devoted to facilitating this interaction. To broaden the field, we changed the conference name to the International Conference on Biometrics with the endorsement of IAPR.

 

More then 190 papers from 20 countries were submitted for ICB 2006.  After a thorough review by the Program Committee and a group of qualified reviewers, 104 papers were selected.  The papers were separated into 7 sections, including Face, Fingerprint, Iris, Speech and Signature, Biometric Fusion and Performance Evaluation, Gait and Keystroke, others.

 

There were 5 keynote speakers at ICB 2006: Mr. Howard Dickson, Government Chief Information Officer, Government of the HKSAR; Prof. Vijayakumar Bhagavatula, Carnegie Mellon University, USA; Dr. Behnam Bavarian, Biometrics Business Group, Motorola, USA; Norihiro Hagita, ATR  Intelligent Robotics and Communication Labs &  ATR  Media Information Science Labs, Japan; Mr. Raymond Wong, Immigration Department, Government of HKSAR.

 

The ICB 2006 Face Verification Contest based on the Xm2vts dataset was organized by Josef Kittler. More than 10 algorithms submitted by three groups were compared.   Motorola Inc., Omron Corporation, Springer, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Chinese Academy of Sciences and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University grasped the opportunity to exhibit their newest products in exhibition.

Conference Report:  ICB 2006

General Chairs:

Anil K. Jain ( Michigan State University, USA)
Roland Chin ( Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, HK)

Return to Home Page