Biometrics research community convenes in Switzerland to tackle top technical challenges

Biometrics researchers have an array of ideas for technologies, metrics and architectures to address the most serious threats to biometric data and systems, and the people who use them. Those ideas were presented at the latest event from the European Association for Biometrics, held in collaboration with the Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) and hosted by the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny, Switzerland and online.

The sold-out two-day EAB & CITeR Biometrics Workshop was divided into four half-day long sets of presentations about biometric template protection, deepfakes, bias, and presentation attack detection. In part it was intended as a follow-up to the EAB workshop on presentation attack detection at Idiap in 2020.

EAB CEO Dinusha Frings noted that over 160 attendees registered ahead of time, with dozens more joining over the two days of the workshop.

The presentations were delivered by representatives from government agencies and universities from around the world, as well as Tech5, Mobai, Trust Stamp, Pindrop, Jenetric, Idemia, Veridium, iProov, and Privately. Presenters include numerous luminaries in the field of biometrics, with keynotes by Marta Gomez-Barrero, Anderson Rocha, Stephanie Schuckers and Gian Luca Marcialis.

Gomez-Barrero presented a case study on the use of bloom filters for cancelable biometrics. Rocha spoke about deepfakes as the tip of the generative AI iceberg that threatens biometrics. Schuckers talked about progress in detecting attacks and reducing bias, and how to measure each. An under-appreciated point mentioned during the talk is that active PAD is not defined in the ISO/IEC 30107 standard. Marcialis shared research on the state of the art in fingerprint PAD, and the next challenges that must be tackled to combat fakes.

Other individual presentations explored novel approaches combining biometrics and encryption, determining where deepfakes come from, face biometrics training data, mitigating demographic disparities, and advanced attacks like face morphing and video injection.

Schuckers introduced the overall theme of the event by noting the rapid expansion of biometric applications, and the corresponding escalation in importance of dealing with the potential problems and vulnerabilities of the technology.

“The issues have been noticed and thought about in theory,” she said, referring to an influential paper on biometric security. “Well now we’re seeing those things in practice, and so it’s more important than ever to batten down the hatches and address these issues.”

The  CITeR Spring 2023 Program Review was co-located with the workshop, along with training events for the EU’s TReSPAsS-ETN and PriMa-ITN projects.

Nominations for the European Biometrics Max Snijder, Research, and Industry Awards, meanwhile, are due by May 14, 2023. Applications must include a research paper and supporting information. Details and application forms are available through the EAB website.

Three prizes of €1,000 are available to European academic and industrial researchers, and will be awarded at Biometrics Week in Darmstadt, Germany.

Article Topics

biometric bias  |  biometrics research  |  CITeR  |  data protection  |  deepfakes  |  EAB  |  European Association for Biometrics  |  Idiap  |  presentation attack detection