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FEATURE

November/December 2007 Biometric Technology Today

The European Biometrics Forum has announced that the EBF European Biometric Research Award 2007, which recognises the significant contributions made in the field of biometrics research in Europe, has been awarded to Krzysztof Kryszczuk, a postgradu-ate student from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.

This is the second year of this unique European award which provides a platform for talented researchers to present their work and encourages continuing essential research in biometrics

Chairman of the Research Award, Jacques Bus from the European Commission’s DG Information Society presented the award to Kryszczuk at the 3rd EBF Research Seminar in Brussels on 2-3 October, an annual research event which this year examined the impact of current biometric deployments on the European research agenda.

The winning research paper was titled ‘‘Improving biometrics verification with class-independent quality information’’ and focused on a new, holistic view on the role of signal quality information on biometric classification (see Box).

As the winner of the EBF European Biometric Research Award 2007, Kryszczuk

received a �5000 honorarium and a commemorative medal.

Krzysztof Kryszczuk obtained his doctorate in Pattern Recognition from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Signal Processing Institute, in 2007. He is a co-founder of PatternLab, a scientific consult-ing company based in Lausanne, Switzerland.

He obtained his M.S. degree in psychol-ogy (cognitive systems engineering) from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2001, and the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Lublin Institute of Technology in 1999.

Krzysztof is also a reviewer for Pattern Recognition Letters, Pattern Analysis and Applications, Journal of Optical Engineering and others. His research interests include biometrics, statistical pattern recognition, image processing, and human-machine interactions.

The juryThe postgraduate students of biometrics were shortlisted for the final by a jury of international biometrics experts that included:

• Prof Dr Christoph Busch, (Fraunhofer-IGD, Germany);

• Prof Bernadette Dorizzi, (Technical Co-ordinator of the NoE BioSecure, France);

• Prof Anil K. Jain, (Dept of Computer Science & Engineering, Michigan State University, USA);

• Prof Josef Kittler, (School of Electronics and Physical Sciences, University of Surrey; UK);

• Dr Gerasimos Potamianos, (Thomas J. Watson Research Centre, IBM , USA);

• Prof Richard Reilly, (University College Dublin, Ireland);

• Dr Günter Schumacher, (EC JRC, IPSC); • Prof Massimo Tistarelli, (University of

Sassari, Italy); • Prof Raymond Veldhuis, (Twente

University, The Netherlands);• Prof James L. Wayman, (National

Biometric Test Center, San Jose State University, USA).

The finalistsThe three finalists of the EBF European Biometric Research Award 2007 were:

• Hervé Bredin, from GET-ENST in Paris, France who presented his paper on ‘Making Talking-Face Authentication Robust to Deliberate Imposture’

• Hugo Gamboa from the Institut Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal with his paper on ‘Web Biometrics: User Verification via Web Interaction’;

• Krzysztof Kryszczuk, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland who discussed his paper on ‘Improving biometrics verifi-cation with class-independent quality information’.

The Research panel gave judgment on the academic and scientific value of the proposed papers and decided the main award of the competition.

A separate jury judged the business potential of the proposed papers for the EBF European Biometric Industry Award 2007. This jury, which was comprised of specialists from the business and public sector, looked at the novelty, applicability and other business aspects of the papers.

Continued on page 10...

European Research Award winner announcedIn its second year now, the European Biometric Forum has awarded the leading lights in the research community prizes based on their contributions to biometric research in Europe. Two prizes were awarded including one that recognises the applicability of their research to business.

Synopsis of the winning paperExisting approaches to biometric classification with quality measures make a clear distinction between the single modality applications and multimodal scenarios. This paper bridges this gap with Q-stack, a stacking-based approach, which makes use of class-independent signal quality measures and baseline classifier scores in order to improve classification in uni- and multimodal systems alike. The work provides a systematic understanding of the role of quality information in biometrics and explains the seemingly counterintuitive notion of using class-independent information for improving class separation based on the analysis of dependencies between baseline classification scores and the quality measures.

The proposed Q-stack approach is a generalised framework of classification with quality information and the existing methods of classification with quality measures can be regarded as its special cases. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates the application of Q-stack on the task of biometric identity verification using face and fingerprint modalities, showing systematic improvements over baseline systems in single- and multi-classifier and multi-modal architectures.

10Biometric Technology Today November/December 2007

Cost estimates steady as UK ID card project rolls on

The identity card project in the UK is one of the largest IT projects ever undertaken by the country’s government. There are many contentious facets to the scheme, such as the storage of biometrics in a large central database. But one of the most notable issues has been based around cost.

Forced by law, the UK government is now required to lay before Parliament every six months the estimated ten-year costs of its national identity card scheme, and the most recent of these reports (November 2007) makes interesting reading.

As with any cost estimates covering a ten year forward period, there are inevitably considerable uncertainties and caveats, a fact which is regularly seized upon by anti-ID card campaigners as being something of a smoke-screen to hide true costs, which they believe will inevitably rise.

As time goes on, it is anticipated that costs will become clearer. By May 2008, the Identity and Passport Service (IPS) should be in a position to award contracts to a number of suppliers which will be selected from its recently-announced shortlist (see Box). This, in turn, will help firm up some of the unknown costs in IPS’s latest report, and possibly help to quell some of the extraordinary claims that have been reported over the last year.

Developments over the last six monthsSince the publication of the UK Government’s last cost report, work to prepare for the implementation of the National Identity Scheme has continued. In particular, over the past six months the following activities have taken place:

• interviews of first time adult passport customers commenced in May 2007 in a limited number of interview offices; with further offices planned to be added pro-gressively to the end of 2007;

• a joint IPS/Criminal Records Bureau trial, undertaken during June 2007 and involving 160 volunteers across England and Wales, demonstrated how the scheme will help make the process of background checks more secure, and much faster, reducing turnaround times from four weeks to four days;

• in June, IPS and the Border and Immigration Agency began piloting an Employers’ Checking Service, which will allow employers to check the validity of British passports presented as evidence of

identity and the right of applicants to live and work in the UK. In a separate ini-tiative, IPS began working with the retail industry on how to standardise proof of age checks for sales of restricted goods such as knives, solvents and alcohol;

• the first phase of the UKvisas Biometrics Programme (capturing ten digital finger-prints from visa applicants) was rolled out. At the end of October 2007, finger-prints were being successfully collected and checked in 111 countries worldwide. Roll-out to the rest of UKvisas’ posts will be complete by the end of 2007/08. To date, over 850 000 sets of prints have been collected, with some 8,750 matches to prints previously taken in the UK. Biometric visas are a vital part of the UK Government’s strategy of strengthening the UK borders, although the costs of implementing the biometric visa are not part of the National Identity Scheme;

• As noted above, IPS published a notice in the Official Journal of the European Union inviting expressions of interest from potential suppliers. This paves the way for a Framework Agreement, a con-tract which creates a list of pre-qualified suppliers, along with a set of agreed contract terms. IPS will then be able to procure its requirements from this pool of suppliers, as and when required. The Framework will also encompass related procurements across the Home Office, such as existing plans to enhance passport

The UK government is required by law to lay before Parliament every six months the estimated ten-year costs of its ambitious biometric-based national identity card scheme. This feature summarizes the government’s latest estimates and analyses some of the highlights in the report. Meanwhile, eight companies have been shortlisted to become prime bidders, with five winning companies to be in place by May 2008.

The winner of the EBF European Biometric Industry Award 2007 was Hervé Bredin. He received a �3000 honorarium and a certificate.

Hugo Gamboa from the Institut Superior Tecnico of Lisbon in Portugal was also praised

for his paper on web biometrics.CEO of the EBF, Max Snijder commented: “The EBF is delighted at the success of the EBF European Biometrics Research Award 2007 which provides an excellent opportunity for researchers to present

their scientific advances directly to relevant audiences and for these audiences to learn about this essential research. The standard of the entries was very high reflecting the great biometrics research work being undertaken throughout Europe.”

FEATURE