CFP: Submission Deadline: Dec. 1, 2007 IJPRAI Special Issue on Facial Image Processing and Analysis
BIOMETRICS - the science and technology of verifying a person's identity. Biometric measures the physical
characteristics that make each of us unique, like the fingerprints, an eye's
retina or iris, a face, a hand, a voice - and uses those measurements to
confirm personal identity. Passwords are difficult to remember and easy to
steal. Keys, driver's licenses and passports can be lost or forged. The human
body, on the other hand, can't be forgotten, stolen, forged or misplaced.
Practical uses for such biometrics are wide spread and include maintaining the
security for both physical space and cyberspace. In particular, biometrics
helps with controlling access to an office, a lab, or ATM, confirm the identity
of buyers and sellers, protecting company networks from hackers, make
electronic commerce safe and reliable, confirm student identity for distant
learning and examinations, and keeping medical records on the web private. As
face recognition technology requires little or no cooperation from the subject,
it is becoming one of the top choices for biometrics and is starting to move
into the commercial market.
FORENSICS - the science
and technology of using and interpreting physical evidence for legal purposes.
Some of the projects undertaken at GMU were related to processing and
interpreting image data, image enhancement, detection of characteristic
landmarks, monitoring and surveillance, and motion analysis and interpretation.
R&D carried out at GMU involves face recognition –
identification, authentication / verification and watch - list and
surveillance, contents - based image retrieval, data compression, benchmark
studies on human performance, performance evaluation, and video processing and
interpretation of human activity. The strategies employed include boosting and
transduction, recognition – by – parts and constellations, and spatial -
temporal subspace image sequence analysis.
Publications and
Professional Activities – In addition to many journal and
conference publications, Dr. Wechsler has organized and directed the seminal
NATO Advanced Study Institute on Face
Recognition : From Theory to Applications, held in UK in 1997, whose
proceedings were published by Springer - Verlag in 1998. Dr. Wechsler directed at GMU the development
of FERET, which has become the standard facial
data base for benchmark studies and experimentation. Dr. Wechsler was granted
(together with his former doctoral students) two patents by USPO in 2004 on
fractal image compression using quad-Q-learning (licensed in 2006) and feature
based classification (for face recognition). A third patent on open set face
recognition (with one of his formerly doctoral students) has been filed with
USPO in 2004. Forthcoming from Springer in 2006 is Dr. Wechsler’s book on Reliable Face Recognition Methods, http://www.springer.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,4-40109-22-52101897-0,00.html.
Dr. Wechsler was granted (together with his former doctoral students) two
patents by USPO in 2004 on fractal image compression using quad-Q-learning
(licensed in 2006) and feature based classification (for face recognition). A
third patent on open set face recognition has been filed with USPO in 2004.
Teaching – see http://cs.gmu.edu/~wechsler/teaching/
Graduate Certificate
in Biometrics: http://cs.gmu.edu/programs/compbiocertificate.html