Pattern Recognition Letters – Special Issue on Mobile and Wearable Biometrics (VSI:MWB)
AIMS AND SCOPE
Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are nowadays daily employed by more than 3 billion people, with an expected further worldwide penetration up to 5 billion users by 2025. Among the reasons for such astonishing growth, from the early years of mobile communications to the present day, there is the fact that modern mobile devices offer the possibility to perform many tasks and access several services, such as taking pictures or perform on-line payments, with an extreme ease of use. As a matter of fact, the share of internet users making mobile online payments is above 30% in most regions of the world.
As the next step in terms of technological revolution, wearable devices such as smart glasses, chestbands, and wristbands, are also rapidly becoming widespread. Thanks to their ability in capturing physiological signals like those related to the heart rate, a vast number of applications is being developed for wearable platforms, ranging from activity tracker and healthcare to social sharing in the context of the Internet of Things.
It has yet to be observed that most of the services which can be performed through mobile and wearable devices are typically accessed and used by providing sensitive and valuable data, such as passwords, credit card numbers, and so forth. Furthermore, the information commonly captured by the sensors with which these devices are equipped, and stored within them, is highly personal, with consequent possible security and privacy issues in case unauthorized subjects try to access such content.
It is therefore of paramount importance to design effective and secure mechanisms to access these devices. In this regard, resorting to biometric recognition systems seems a natural choice. Mobile and wearable devices are in fact commonly equipped with several sensors which could be exploited to acquire discriminative traits, thus allowing to recognize the authorized users.
Furthermore, the possibility of performing biometric recognition within mobile and wearable devices may come in handy to use them as authenticating tokens, providing the means to perform decentralized access control, thus exploiting mobile and wearable technology as authenticating means by combining their capabilities with biometric solutions. Such approach would for instance allow to design reliable systems performing continuous recognition, monitoring the identity of a subject during a period of indefinite temporal extension, hence providing robustness against session hi-jacking, in which an intruder may seize control of an ongoing session after a successful login of a legitimate user.
It is yet worth remarking that the systems to be implemented for such devices should be designed while taking into account the specific peculiarities of the considered scenarios. For instance, with respect to solutions dedicated to desktop systems, where physical characteristics are commonly preferred, approaches based on either behavioural or cognitive traits might be more appropriate when dealing with mobile and wearable devices. The computational complexity of the required processing may also represent a concern for systems with limited resources available.
The present special issue therefore seeks for recent and innovative developments in pattern recognition fields with applications to the design of biometric recognition systems for mobile and wearable devices. Topics of interest include, for example, the analysis and processing of the discriminative information (biosignals, images) which can be captured through mobile and wearable devices, the design of hardware architectures or software packages which could be effectively implemented in such environments, the proposal of machine learning approaches requiring limited computational resources, among others.
TOPICS
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
· Mobile biometrics in the wild;
· Continuous biometric recognition using wearable devices;
· Sensors for wearable technology (smartwatches, smart eyewear, smart t-shirt, etc.);
· Physical and behavioral in the mobile environment;
· Cognitive biometrics for wearable devices;
· Age and aging effects in mobile biometrics;
· Machine learning with limited computational resources;
· Biometric template protection: challenges and solutions in the mobile environment;
· Usability, interfaces, and human factors;
· Hardware architectures and software for biometric recognition on mobile and wearable devices;
· Affective computing in biometric recognition.
IMPORTANT DATES
· Submission period: September 1-20, 2021
· First review notification: November 7, 2021
· Revision submission: December 19, 2021
· Second review notification: January 23, 2022
· Final submission: March 6, 2022
· Final notice of acceptance/rejection: April 10, 2022
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Paper submissions must conform to the Pattern Recognition Letters format guidelines. Manuscripts can have no more than 7 pages (plus one page after revision) and must be submitted to the online submission system. When submitting their papers through the online system, authors must select the acronym ”VSI:MWB” as the article type.
Submissions to the special issue must include new, unpublished, original research. Papers must be original and have not been published or submitted elsewhere. If the submissions are extended works of previously published papers, the original works should be included and a description of the changes that have been made should be provided. The submission should include at least 30% new contribution of high relevance. The title and the figures of the submitted paper should be different, and the common part of the conference paper and of the extended version cannot be verbatim the same.
Guest editors will make an initial determination of the suitability and scope of all submissions. All submissions deemed suitable to be sent for peer review will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. Once your manuscript is accepted, it will go into production, and will be simultaneously published in the current regular issue and pulled into the online Special Issue. Articles from this Special Issue will appear in different regular issues of the journal, though they will be clearly marked and branded as Virtual Special Issue articles. Please see an example here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/science-of-the-total-environment/special-issue/10SWS2W7VVV .
GUEST EDITORS
Ph.D. Emanuele Maiorana, Roma Tre University, Italy
Ph.D. Ruggero Donida Labati, University of Milan, Italy
Prof. Shiqi Yu, Southern University of Science and Technology, China
CONTACTS
For further information, please send an email to Emanuele Maiorana at emanuele.maiorana@uniroma3.it
__________________________________________________________________
Emanuele Maiorana Ph.D.
Section of Applied Electronics, Department of Engineering, Roma Tre University,
Via Vito Volterra 62, 00146 Roma, Italy
Ph. +39 0657337365
Lab URL http://biomedia4n6.uniroma3.it
Personal http://biomedia4n6.uniroma3.it/maiorana.html