Biometrics in Smart Cities: Techniques and Applications

MOTIVATIONS

Smart Cities aim at improving the daily life of the citizens, by upgrading the services in terms of mobility, communications and power efficiency. Also, by measuring and acquiring the habits of a specific subject, it is meant to offer specific user-oriented services. In this scenario, biometric recognition covers a privileged role. Researchers worldwide agree with the fact that biometric credentials are difficult to be stolen and do not need to be remembered, so making them suitable for on-the-move authentication or video surveillance applications in smart cities environments.

In order to be compliant with requirements of a really smart scenario, biometric recognition must be non-intrusive and transparent to the user, being also able to acquire data and information in ”in-the-wild” environment, thus providing a natural tool to customize the surrounding environment to user needs and attitudes.

Strong biometric traits like fingerprint or palmprint may work a in very limited range of possible applications. Conversely, contactless biometric traits, and more in particular soft biometrics, still represent an unexplored field of research in this sense.

The ever-increasing number of surveillance cameras everywhere and the unrestrainable growth in usage of wearable devices implies the number of facial images and video available will grow exponentially. These conditions pose the premises for a wide range of application fields dealing with tracking and pose estimation of people for gait and gender recognition, person re-identification in adverse and crowded scenes, biometric data fusion to improve recognition accuracy and so on. Recent deep neural network models have shown a significant improvement on still images and video sequences in these areas, but a wide set of open problems persists and to which solutions still have not been clearly defined.

TOPICS

The objective of this virtual special issue is to solicit and publish the latest advances on this topic which includes, but are not limited to, the following:

• Contactless biometric recognition suitable for smart environments;
• Face recognition in the wild;
• Pose estimation and gait recognition;
• Person re-identification in surveillance;
• Voice recognition;
• Liveness/Spoofing Detection for biometric attacks;
• Continuous biometric authentication approaches;
• Cloud-based biometrics databases;
• Biometric Access Control to cloud services;
• Biometric Systems for Cloud-based Architectures;
• Mobile Biometrics and Cloud Computing;
• Cloud-based Communication Protocols for Biometric Systems;
• Biometric-based customized content presentation;
• Biometric Security in smart environments.
• Bio signal Security
• Bio signal Steganography
• Data Hiding

IMPORTANT DATES

First submission paper due: April 26 – May 20, 2020

First review notification: July 1st, 2020

Revision submission: July 31st, 2020

Second review notification: September 1st, 2020

Final notice of acceptance/rejection: October 1st, 2020

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Paper submissions must conform to the Pattern Recognition Letters format guidelines (https://www.elsevier.com/journals/pattern-recognition-letters/0167-8655?generatepdf=true)

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:BI_SCI” 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.

Guest editors will make an initial determination of the suitability and scope of all submissions.

CONTACTS

For inquiries regarding the special issue, send an email to the managing guest editor at: mnappi@unisa.it

GUEST EDITORS

Michele Nappi, University of Salerno (Italy)

Silvio Barra, University of Cagliari (Italy)

Aniello Castiglione, University of Naples Parthenope (Italy)

Fabio Narducci, University of Naples Parthenope (Italy)

Vijayakumar Pandi, University college of Engineering (INDIA)

In memoriam professor Alfredo Petrosino