| The past decade has seen a rapid growth in the demand for biometric-based authentication solutions for a number of applications. With significant advances in biometric technology and an increase in the number of applications incorporating biometrics, it is essential that we bring together researchers from academia and industry as well as practitioners to share ideas, problems and solutions for the development and successful deployment of state-of-the-art biometric systems.
The International Conference on Biometric Authentication (ICBA 2004) was the first major gathering in the Asia-Pacific region devoted to facilitating this interaction. We are pleased that this conference attracted a large number of high-quality research papers that will benefit the international biometrics research community. After a careful review of 157 submissions, 101 papers were accepted either as oral (35) or poster (66) presentations. In addition to these technical presentations, this conference also presented the results and summaries of three biometric competitions: Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC 2004), Face Authentication Competition (FAC 2004), and Signature Verification Competition (SVC 2004). This conference provided a forum for the practitioners to discuss their practical experiences in applying the state-of-the-art biometric technologies which will further stimulate research in biometrics.
We are grateful to Jim L. Wayman, Edwin Rood, Raymond Wong, Jonathon Philips, and Francis Ho for accepting our invitation to give keynote talks at ICBA 2004. In addition, we would like to express our gratitude to all the contributors, reviewers, program committee and organizing committee members who made this a very successful conference. We also wish to acknowledge the Croucher Foundation, the International Association of Pattern Recognition, IEEE Hong Kong Section, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the National Natural Science Foundation in China, and Springer-Verlag for sponsoring this conference.
Special thanks are due to Ajay Kumar, Vivien Lau, Jane You, George Baciu, Yunhong Wang, Jie Zhou, Michael Wong, Jie Guo, Jingqi Yan, Guangming Lu and Jiannong Cao for their dedication and hard work in various aspects of conference organization.
We hope that the fruitful technical interactions made possible by this conference will benefit your research and development efforts in biometrics. |
