Title:  Biometrics Under Attack

Abstract: Biometrics is the science of recognizing individuals based on their physical and behavioral attributes such as fingerprints, face, iris, voice and gait. The past decade has witnessed tremendous progress in this field, including the deployment of biometric solutions in diverse applications such as border security, national ID cards, amusement parks, access control, and smartphones. Despite these advancements, biometric systems have to contend with a number of challenges related to data quality, presentation attacks, and personal privacy. For example, a biometric system is vulnerable to “spoof attacks” where an adversary imitates the biometric trait (e.g., fingerprint) of another person. Further, issues related to “information leakage”, where the biometric data of an individual is processed to extract additional information (such as age, gender, race, etc.) beyond what was expressed at the time of data collection, can undermine personal privacy. This talk will highlight some of the recent progress made in the field of biometrics; present our lab’s work on presentation attack detection and privacy impartation to biometric data; and discuss some of the challenges that have to be solved in order to promote the widespread use of this technology.

Bio: Arun Ross is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University, and is the Director of the Integrated Pattern Recognition and Biometrics (iPRoBe) Lab. He conducts research on the topic of biometrics, privacy, computer vision and pattern recognition. He is a recipient of the JK Aggarwal Prize and the Young Biometrics Investigator Award from the International Association of Pattern Recognition for his contributions to the field of Pattern Recognition and Biometrics. He was designated a Kavli Fellow by the US National Academy of Sciences by virtue of his presentation at the 2006 Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposia. Ross is also a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the 2005 Biennial Pattern Recognition Journal Best Paper Award and the Five Year Highly Cited BTAS 2009 Paper Award. He is a co-author of the monograph “Handbook of Multibiometrics” and the textbook “Introduction to Biometrics”.

Web: http://iprobe.cse.msu.edu/
Email: rossarun@cse.msu.edu