The IEEE Biometrics Council invites participants to the upcoming (free)
webinar by Prof. Ran He on “Heterogeneous Face Recognition”. Detail on
the webinar are given below:

Title: Heterogeneous Face Recognition
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Ran He, National Laboratory of Pattern Recognition,
CASIA, China
When: 29 March 2023, at 10am Beijing time (4 am CEST, for US: March 28 –
9 pm CST, 10pm EST)
Where: Online (Zoom)
Registration: (free, but required):
https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QhsNRSWRQTOP3KJXkWVVVw

*** Talk Summary ***
Ubiquitous vision sensors not only facilitate the wide application of
face recognition but also generate various heterogeneous sets of facial
images. Matching faces across different sensing modalities raises the
problem of heterogeneous face recognition (HFR) or cross domain face
recognition. Due to significant difference in sensing processes,
heterogeneous images of the same subject have large appearance
variations, which has distinguished HFR from regular visible face
recognition. During last several years, our research group have
investigated a range such problems and developed applications. This talk
will focus on research and recent advances of heterogeneous face
recognition, including fundamental models, face recognition method and
recognition from synthesis.

*** About the Speaker ***
Dr. Ran He received the PhD degrees in pattern recognition and
intelligence system from Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of
Sciences (CASIA), China, in 2009. He has been a professor at National
Laboratory of Pattern Recognition since December, 2016. He is now
directing the visual perception and machine learning group. He has
published two books and more than 200 papers in refereed journals and
conference proceedings in the areas of computer vision, pattern
recognition, and image processing. He is the editor board member of IEEE
TIP, IEEE T-BIOM and Pattern Recognition. He was the area chair of
CVPR/ECCV/ICML/NeurIPS. His research won IEEE SPS Young Author Best
Paper Award (2020), IAPR ICPR Best Scientific Paper Award (2020), and
IEEE ICB Honorable Mention Paper Award (2019). He is the 2022 recipient
of CAS Outstanding Tutor Award. He is a senior member of the IEEE and
also a Fellow of IAPR.

For more information, visit:
https://ieee-biometrics.org/index.php/activities/webinars

next 1-hour webinar with Peter Schelkens on “Holographic
visualization:signal processing and technological challenges”
[6:30 a.m. New-York] – [12:30 p.m. Paris/Brussels] – [6:30 p.m. Beijing]

TO JOIN THE WEBINAR, PLEASE REGISTER TO RECEIVE MORE DETAILS ON HOW TO
CONNECT. The registration form can be found at:
https://forms.gle/9JCc6NBgM1x2kZK6A.
*If you wish to promote a EURASIP journal special issue, conference,
event, or new image/video database at an upcoming webinar, please reply
to this email with additional details.

TITLE: Holographic visualization: signal processing and technological
challenges

ABSTRACT:3D visualization has received increased attention in recent
years, significantly boosted by the advent of new AR/VR/XR display
devices and the metaverse paradigm. However, current display solutions
based on – for example – stereoscopic or light field representations
still depict significant shortcomings regarding, e.g., supported viewing
angle and eye accommodation. Using the holographic modality instead
might bring a solution to the encountered problems. Though the term
holography is often misused because of marketing reasons – the name is
often linked with ideal 3D visualization solutions – real holography
uses a wave-based light propagation model instead of the ray-based
models used for regular 3D visualization systems.
Notwithstanding the big promises of holography and the evolution of the
underlying supporting technologies, the challenges of bringing this
technology to the professional and consumer markets are still huge.
This talk will focus on the challenges related to the generation,
processing, coding, and quality assessment of holographic content in
combination with the underlying computation, optoelectronic, optical and
photonics hardware. In this context, also the status of JPEG Pleno,
currently defining the first international standard for coding of
holographic content, will be discussed.

BIO: Peter Schelkens received his degree in electronic engineering in
VLSI-design from the Industriële Hogeschool Antwerpen- Mechelen (IHAM),
Campus Mechelen, in 1991. After that, he obtained an electrical
engineering degree (MSc) in applied physics (1994), a biomedical
engineering postgraduate degree with a specialization in medical physics
(1995), and, finally, a Ph.D. degree in applied sciences (2001) from the
Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB).
Peter Schelkens currently holds a professorship at the Department of
Electronics and Informatics (ETRO) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel
(VUB), Belgium. He is also affiliated with the Interuniversity Institute
for Microelectronics (imec) in Leuven, Belgium, where he is currently
active as principal investigator.
The research interests of Peter Schelkens are situated in the field of
multidimensional signal processing encompassing the representation,
communication, security, rendering and quality assessment of these
signals. In 2013 he was awarded an EU ERC Consolidator Grant focusing on
digital holography.
Peter Schelkens has published over 300 papers in journals and conference
proceedings, and he holds several patents. His team participates in the
ISO/IEC JTC1 /SC 29/WG 1 (JPEG) standardization activities. Since 2018,
he has been rapporteur/chair of the JPEG Coding, Test and Quality
Subgroup and he is actively involved in coordinating the JPEG PLENO
standardization activity. He is currently also convenor of ISO/IEC JTC1
/SC 29/AG 4 coordinating the collaboration between JPEG and MPEG
communities.
Peter Schelkens is associate editor of Elsevier Signal Processing: Image
Communication, AOP JPhys Photonics, Springer Journal of Quality and User
Experience, and Light: Advanced Manufacturing. He has been previously
associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video
Technology.

Webinar videos are available online at https://vimeo.com/showcase/8005816.

Held in conjunction with IEEE IJCB 2023
https://ijcb2023.ieee-biometrics.org/

Important dates: Registration is open now
UERC 2023 Website: http://awe.fri.uni-lj.si/uerc.html
***********************************

Ear recognition is an active area of research within the biometric
community. However, the work in this field has long focused on maximizing
raw recognition performance, while other aspects critical for the
deployment of biometrics recognition techniques in practice have largely
been ignored. One such example is demographic bias. Modern ear
recognition approaches are not only expected to be highly efficient when
recognizing individuals, but also to be equally fair in their decisions,
regardless of the demographic characteristics of the subjects, e.g.,
gender or ethnicity. The 2023 Unconstrained Ear Recognition Challenge
will, therefore, investigate the performance as well as demographic bias
of existing ear recognition solutions and promote research into
bias-mitigation mechanisms that have minimal impact on the recognition
performance.

Understanding demographic bias is important because it can help to
identify and mitigate inaccuracies and errors in biometric systems,
prevent the development of discriminatory systems, and even inform the
public policies and regulations related to biometric systems. Research
related to demographic bias in ear recognition techniques can help
promote the development of more accurate, fair, and just ear recognition
systems that are less likely to produce errors or false positives for
certain groups of people and protect individual's rights and interests.

To promote research in the bias-aware ear recognition, the Unconstrained
Ear Recognition Challenge (UERC) 2023 will bring together researchers
working in the field of ear recognition and benchmark existing and new
algorithms on a common dataset and under a predefined experimental protocol.

*** How to Participate? ***
To participate in UERC 2023 fill out the following registration form:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdrXKDcor2MRsvOsdAkjptcCJSZ40NbLHo4Tc5GjP7-pzRGMQ/viewform

*** Execution ***
UERC 2023 will be organized as a two-track competition, where each track
will be focused on one specific goal. Participants will be free to enter
only a single track or compete in both. For each track, a dataset,
evaluation tool written in Python, and baseline models in Python will be
made available. A detailed description of the two tracks is given below:

Track 1: Fair Ear Recognition. The first UERC 2023 evaluation track will
collect ear recognition models and score their performance on ear images
captured in unconstrained environments. Here, the performance indicators
will include both, a measure of recognition performance as well as an
estimate of the exhibited demographic bias. Both recognition and bias
scores will contribute to the overall ranking. Participants will be free
to develop any type of model to maximize performance, while minimizing
bias. The final submission for this track will include a working
solution (source code or compiled binary), which the organizers will run
to evaluate the performance on a sequestered test data.

Track 2: Bias Mitigation. The second UERC 2023 track will address bias
mitigation strategies explicitly. Here, a baseline ResNet model (written
in Python) will be made available to the participants and the goal will
be to design bias mitigation schemes that reduce the initial bias of the
models without adversely affecting performance. Such schemes may include
additional model blocks and network components, normalization layers,
knowledge infusion mechanisms, score normalization procedures, image
preprocessing approaches and any other solution capable of reducing bias
of the predefined base model. Similarly to the first track, participants
will have to submit a working solution that the organizers will evaluate
on the sequestered test data.

*** Summary paper and co-authorship ***
The results of UERC 2023 will be published in the IJCB conference paper
authored jointly by all participants of the challenge.

*** Organizers ***
+ Asst. Prof. Žiga Emeršič, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer
and Information Science, Slovenia
+ Prof. Hazım Kemal Ekenel, Istanbul Technical University, Department of
Computer Engineering, Turkey
+ Prof. Guillermo Camara-Chavez, Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil
+ Prof. Peter Peer, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and
Information Science, Slovenia
+ Prof. Vitomir Štruc, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Electrical
Engineering, Slovenia, EU

*** Timeline ***
+ February 14th: Promotion of the competition, website draft,
registration opens.
+ February 15th: Kick-off of the competition: data, toolkit and
instructions made available on UERC  website.
+ April 15th: Possible interim ranking.
+ May 1st: Registration closes, end of the competition.
+ May 15th: Summary paper submission.