Outcome: Joint journal paper
Registration deadline: October 10th, 2020

Website: https://sites.google.com/view/ssbc2020/group-evaluation
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GROUP EVALUATION OF SCLERA SEGMENTATION MODELS

*** CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS ***

INTRODUCTION
Sclera biometrics have gained significant popularity among emerging
ocular traits in the last few years. In order to establish the sclera as
a viable biometric trait and to evaluate its potential for automated
biometric systems, several works have been presented in the literature,
employing sclera both individually and in combination with the iris.
Despite these initiatives, sclera biometrics need to be studied more
extensively to ascertain their usefulness. Among the numerous challenges
still open in this area, efficient and robust sclera segmentation is
among the most important ones, affecting all downstream tasks from
normalization to recognition. While a considerable amount of research
has been directed towards sclera segmentation in recent years, the
performance of existing techniques especially in various scenarios are
still not well explored.

Several group benchmarking efforts have been organized in the scope of
major biometric conferences to address this gap, namely SSBC 2015, SSRBC
2016, SSBC 2016, SSERBC 2017, SSBC 2018 and SSBC 2019 that were held in
conjunction with BTAS 2015, ICB 2016, BTAS 2016, IJCB 2017, ICB 2018 and
ICB 2019, respectively. The latest in the series, SSBC 2020m was
organized in the scope of IJCB 2020 and explored the performance of
sclera segmentation models in mobile settings.

As the next step in the series of competition, the organizers of SSBC
2020 are planning to conduct the largest group benchmarking effort to
date and submit the results and corresponding analysis to a major
biometric journal (TBD). The paper describing the group benchmarking
effort will be *** co-authored by all participants ***.

The planned paper will be partially based on the submissions to SSBC
2020 but will include new experiments on multiple datasets that will
allow for a more detailed analysis of the results with novel insights.
We invite researchers working on problems related ocular biometrics and
sclera segmentation to take part in the benchmarking effort and
contribute models for scoring and analysis. The benchmarking effort is
open to anyone and is not limited solely to participants of previous
benchmarking competitions.

BENCHMARKING LOGISTICS
Participants will be given training datasets to develop and train their
segmentation models. A list of experiments will be provided and
instructions on how to train multiple instances of the developed model.
All trained models will then have to be tested on a number of test
datasets. The organizers will score and analyze the submitted results.

REGISTRATION PROCEDURE
Researchers interested in participating should send an e-amil to Dr.
Abhijit Das with the subject line “Post SSBC 2020 benchmarking effort”
with the following information: Name, Affiliation, Email, Phone number,
CV, Mailing Address.

TIMELINE
Registration starts 8th September 2020
Training datasets available 8th September 2020
Test dataset made available 8th September2020
Registration closes 10th October 2020

ORGANIZERS:
Dr. Abhijit Das, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India
(abhijit.das@inria.fr)
Prof. Umapada Pal, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India
Matej Vitek, PhD candidate, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Prof. Peter Peer, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
Assoc. Prof. Vitomir Štruc, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia