ICB2012

The 5thIAPR International Conference on Biometrics (ICB 2012) was held in New Delhi, India. This IAPR flagship conference was co-sponsored by the IEEE and hosted by the IIIT Delhi. The ICB conference series is one of the premier forums for presenting new research findings in the field of biometrics. In 2006, two highly reputed conferences, the Audio and Video–based Personal Authentication (AVBPA) series running since 1997 and the International Conference on Biometric Authentication (ICBA) series running since 2004, merged to launch the new ICB series, which is now considered one of the best gatherings of biometric researchers. This is not only a platform for presenting the foremost biometric research papers but it gives an opportunity for the best of biometric minds to mingle and share ideas. It was especially exciting to host the 2012 conference in India, the first in the history of this series (and its predecessors).

This year the conference received 240 paper submissions. Based on the reviews and recommendations of the reviewers, 82 papers were accepted for presentation at the conference: 36 papers were presented in 6 oral sessions while the remaining 46 papers were presented in 2 poster sessions. Further, the poster presenters had the opportunity to provide a two-minute oral overview of their papers to the audience prior to the poster session.

The ICB 2012 program schedule encompassed a broad range of topics from various research groups around the world. Besides advancing the state-of-the-art of traditional biometric modalities such as face, fingerprint, and iris recognition, the papers addressed important problems in template security, biometric fusion, data privacy, performance evaluation, forensic analysis, quality assessment, multispectral recognition, template aging, and soft biometrics. The paper presentations were complemented with four invited tutorial talks offered by distinguished researchers. The tutorial topics were chosen to emphasize the most mature and widely deployed biometrics technologies and best practices. The tutorial speakers included Prof. Stan Z. Li (face recognition), Prof. Davide Maltoni (fingerprint recognition), Prof. John Daugman (iris recognition), and Prof. James L. Wayman (biometric best practices and applications).

ICB 2012 also featured a distinguished set of keynote speakers: Nandan Nilekani, Chairman of UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India), Ming Hsieh, President of 3M Cogent, and John Daugman, a pioneer of iris recognition technology. These three individuals have made outstanding and long-lasting contributions to biometrics in different ways: Nandan Nilekani for his role in deploying biometrics for governance and for leading the world’s largest biometrics identification program (Aadhaar) for Indian residents, Ming Hsieh as a prominent entrepreneur in biometrics, and John Daugman, who delivered the 2012 IAPR Biometrics Lecture at ICB2012, as an academician and pioneer of iris technology. Moreover, Ram Sewak Sharma Director General of UIDAI welcomed the participants at the opening session. A panel discussion on “UIDAI System, from its concept, design, implementation, and current state” led by head of technology for UIDAI, Srikanth Nadhamuni provided a systems’ view of a very large scale biometric implementation.

ICB 2012 received the generous support of several organizations without which this conference would not have been possible. In particular, support from 4G Identity Solutions, Broadcom, Validity Sensors, Cogent 3M, Crossmatch, SmartID, IIIT Delhi, Lumidigm, Neurotechnology, SafranMorpho, Suprema, CMC, Cognitec, Geodesic, and NEC is appreciated and acknowledged.

The financial support from the biometric industry and the IAPR enabled the ICB organizers to offer several students travel fellowships and best paper/poster awards. IAPR travel fellowships were provided to 12 students from different parts of the world to present their papers. The 3M Cogent Best Paper Award (1st Place) was given to Oleg V. Komogortsev, Alex Karpov, Larry R. Price (all from Texas State University) and Cecilia Aragon (University of Washington) for their paper titled “Biometric Authentication via Oculomotor Plant Characteristics. The CMC Best Paper Award (2nd Place) was given to Martin Hofmann, Stephan M. Schmidt, AN. Rajagopalan, and Gerhard Rigoll (all from Technische Universitat Munchen) for their paper on “Combined Face and Gait Recognition using Alpha Matte Preprocessing”. The IAPR Best Biometrics Student Paper Award was given to Soweon Yoon, Qijun Zhao, and Anil K. Jain (all from Michigan State University) for their paper “On Matching Altered Fingerprints”. The Cognitec Best Student Paper Award (2nd Place) was given to Finnian Kelly (Trinity College Dublin), Andrzej Drygajlo (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne), and Naomi Harte (Trinity College Dublin) for their paper on “Speaker Verification with Long-Term Ageing Data”. The two poster awards, Lumidigm Best Poster Award (1st Place) and Geodesic Best Poster Award (2nd Place) were given to “Lef3a: Pupil Segmentation Using Viterbi Search Algorithm” by Emine Krichen (Morpho) and “Faster Secure Computation for Biometric Identification Using Filtering” by Julien Bringer, Melanie Favre, Herve Chabanne, and Alain Patey (all from Morpho), respectively.

Over 200 participants from 28 different countries attended the conference. A cultural program was also organized during banquet that was enjoyed by the participants. The conference ended with a vote of thanks to all the participants by Prof. Anil Jain.

The next ICB will be organized in Madrid, Spain from June 5 – 7, 2013.

John Daugman delivering the

IAPR Keynote Talk

‘Iris Recognition at 20 Years: From Zero to 100 Trillion Iris Comparisons per Day’.

IAPR Best Biometrics Student Paper Award was given to Soweon Yoon,

Qijun Zhao, and Anil K. Jain (all from Michigan State University)

for their paper

“On Matching Altered Fingerprints”.