Conference Report:  IJCB 2011

Report prepared by Kevin Bowyer (USA)

General Chairs:

Kevin Bowyer (USA)

Rama Chellappa, IAPR Fellow (USA)

 

Program Chairs:

Terry Boult (USA)
Josef Kittler, IAPR Fellow (UK)

Ajay Kumar (Hong Kong)

The International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB) represents the joining of two major conference series in biometrics research, the Biometrics Theory, Applications and Systems (BTAS) tradition and the International Conference on Biometrics (ICB) tradition. Measured by the number of papers submitted, IJCB 2011 is the largest of either conference held to date. IJCB 2011 was made possible through special agreement between the IEEE Biometrics Council and the IAPR TC 4. Based on the success of IJCB 2011, discussions are in progress to have another IJCB in 2014.

We want to sincerely  thank our IJCB 2011 conference sponsors. Honeywell graciously and generously sponsored the Honeywell Best Student Paper Award, as they have in past years at BTAS. Progeny Systems graciously and generously sponsored the conference reception on the first night of the conference, as they have in past years at BTAS. We also greatly appreciate the support of this year’s general sponsors: L1 Identity Systems, Cognitec, SAIC, and IET Journals.

The winner of the Honeywell Best Student Paper Award is “Mining patterns of orientations and magnitudes for face recognition”, by Ngoc-Son Vu and Alice Caplier at Grenoble INP. The Honeywell Best Student Paper Award was selected from among the best-reviewed submissions to the conference by a special committee appointed by the Program Chairs.

Following the ICB tradition, the IAPR Best Biometrics Student Paper Award was awarded to the paper “Latent Fingerprint Enhancement via Robust Orientation Field Estimation”, by Soweon Yoon at Michigan State, Jianjiang Feng at Tsinghua University, and Anil Jain, IAPR Fellow, at Michigan State. The IAPR Best Biometrics Student Paper Award was selected by a committee organized by the IAPR TC 4.

Following the BTAS tradition, IJCB also included Best Poster Paper Awards that were selected from among each day’s poster presentations by a vote of the attendees at the conference. There was a tie on Tuesday, and a single winner on each of the other two days. The winning papers on Tuesday were “On Co-training Online Biometric Classifiers”, by Himanshu Bhatt, Samarth Bharadwaj, Richa Singh, and Mayank Vatsa, all from IIIT Delhi, and Afzel Noore and Arun Ross, from West Virginia University, and “Latent-to-full palmprint comparison based on radial triangulation under forensic conditions” by Ruifang Wang, Daniel Ramos, Julian Fierrez, from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. The winner on Wednesday was “Reliability-balanced Feature Level Fusion for Fuzzy Commitment Scheme”, by Christian Rathgeb, Andreas Uhl and Peter Wild, from the University of Salzburg. The winner on Thursday was “Investigating Age Invariant Face Recognition Based on Periocular Biometrics”, by Felix Juefei-Xu (Carnegie Mellon University), Khoa Luu (Concordia University), Marios Savvides (Carnegie Mellon University), Tien Bui (Concordia University), and Ching Y. Suen, IAPR Fellow (Concordia University).

The very international flavor of IJCB 2011 is exemplified in the range of countries represented in the award-winning papers. Authors of the various award-winning papers are at institutions in Austria, Canada, China, France, India, Spain and the United States.

IJCB 2011 included a number of changes and improvements relative to past BTAS and ICB conferences. For the first time, there was a Doctoral Consortium, with PhD student participation sponsored by the National Science Foundation and by IAPR. Reviewing this year was done in “double blind” style and allowed for an author rebuttal phase, as described below. And relative to the BTAS conference series, both a tutorials program and a competitions program were added. In addition, the presentations at this year’s conference were recorded and are available online at www.TechTalks.tv. We hope that this will provide a lasting value to attendees and others who are interesting in biometrics, complementary to the published papers being available in IEEE Xplore.

IJCB 2011 had 324 papers registered and 306 reviewed, from which 31 papers were accepted for oral and 76 for poster presentations. This represents an increase in papers submitted, accepted and overall selectivity relative to past BTAS and ICB conferences. The topics with the most submissions were 2D face, fingerprint and iris with 71, 29, and 29 submissions respectively.

The review process for IJCB 2011 was diligent and required 951 reviews to support the decision process. This involved 154 reviewers who spent significant time and effort in reviewing. IJCB 2011 introduced a rebuttal phase for the authors to comment on the reviews and a discussion phase for the reviewers to discuss among themselves. The discussion phase enabled each reviewer to adjust his/her reviews based on the opinions of the other reviewers, the rebuttal from the authors and a discussion. The whole process, conducted double blind within CMT, tended to result in a consensus opinion on most submissions. Papers associated with any Chair were handled separately with no involvement of that Chair and virtually no difference in acceptance rate. The Program Chairs carefully considered all the information available to make the final decisions on accepted. The Program Chairs coordinated the provision of meta-reviews, especially for the submissions with inconsistent reviews. The rigorous acceptance standards and selectivity resulted in rejection of some potentially interesting papers that suffered from presentation problems.

The resulting Conference Program had wide international representation, with papers from 26 countries. It includes four tutorials, and the presentation of the results of four biometric algorithm competitions. The Conference Program was further enhanced by 3 invited talks by eminent speakers. Brian Lovell, IAPR Fellow, gave The 2011 IAPR Biometrics Lecture, speaking on “Remote Face, Iris, and Appearance Biometrics for Border and Transport Security”. Mark Nixon gave a very entertaining talk at the conference banquet on “A Brief History of Biometrics In the Media”. And Dr. Michael C. King gave an excellent overview of current advances in biometric technology spurred by the IARPA BEST program that he directs, titled “Current Successes and Future Directions of the BEST Program”.

It is time now to make plans to attend ICB 2012 and BTAS 2012!

IAPR TC-4

Biometrics

IEEE Biometrics Council

Proceedings of the conference have been published by IEEE

 

Click here to go to the

IEEEXplore

web page for the

IJCB 2011 Proceedings

Professors Rama Chellappa, IAPR Fellow, and Kevin Bowyer presented the Honeywell Best Student Paper Award to Ngoc-Son Vu.

Massimo Tistarelli, IAPR Fellow, presented the IAPR Best Biometrics Student Paper Award to Soweon Yoon.

Richa Singh from IIIT Dehli presents a poster paper that received a Best Poster Paper Award selected by the vote of IJCB attendees.