It is a pleasure and an honour both to organize ICB 2009, the 3rd IAPR/IEEE International Conference on Biometrics. This will be held 2–5 June in Alghero, Italy, hosted by the Computer Vision Laboratory, University of Sassari. The conference series is the premier forum for presenting research in biometrics and its allied technologies: the generation of new ideas, new approaches, new techniques and new evaluations. The ICB series originated in 2006 from joining two highly reputed conferences: Audio and Video Based Personal Authentication (AVBPA) and the International Conference on Biometric Authentication (ICBA). Previous conferences were held in Hong Kong and in Korea. This is the first time the ICB conference has been held in Europe, and by Programme Committee, arrangements and by the quality of the papers, ICB 2009 will continue to maintain the high standards set by its predecessors.
In total we received around 250 papers for review. Of these, 36 were selected for oral presentation and 93 for poster presentation. These papers are accompanied by the invited speakers: Heinrich H. Bülthoff (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany) on “What Can Machine Vision Learn from Human Perception?”, Sadaoki Furui (Department of Computer Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology) on “40 Years of Progress in Automatic Speaker Recognition Technology” and Jean-Christophe Fondeur (SAGEM Security and Morpho, USA) on “Large Scale Deployment of Biometrics and Border Control”. In this conference we have also explored the evaluation of biometrics with a session of papers on challenges in evaluations: one on “Face Video Competition at ICB2009”, on “Fingerprint and On-line Signature Verification Competitions at ICB 2009”, on “Partial Face Matching between Near Infrared and Visual Images in MBGC Portal Challenge”, and on “Overview of the Multiple Biometric Grand Challenge”. The conference itself is followed by the annual Biometrics Summer School which has been held at Alghero for the past six years and its presenters, past and present, feature many of the programme and organising committee.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Biometrics, ICB 2009, held in Alghero, Italy, June 2-5, 2009.
The 36 revised full papers and 93 revised poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 250 submissions. Biometric criteria covered by the papers are assigned to face, speech, fingerprint and palmprint, multibiometrics and security, gait, iris, and other biometrics. In addition there are 4 papers on challenges and competitions that currently are under way, thus presenting an overview on the evaluation of biometrics.