Professor Harry Wechsler

Department of Computer Science

George Mason University

Fairfax, VA 22030

e-mail : wechsler@cs.gmu.edu

web : http://cs.gmu.edu/~wechsler/

(703) 993-1533 (office)

(703) 993-1530 (sec)

(703)993-1710 (fax)

GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY

SPRING '2006

CS 667 Biometrics

Class Information

001 10912 R (“Thursday”) 7:20 p.m. – 10:00 p.m. Robinson A249

Prerequisites

CS 580 or permission of the instructor

Office Hours

Thursday 6:15 – 7:00 PM or by appointment (SITE II - Rm. 461)

Textbook

Guide to Biometrics by Bolle, Connell, Pankanti, Ratha, and Senior, Springer 2004.

References

1. Biometric Identification in Networked Society by Jain, Bolle and Pankanti (Eds.), Kluwer, 1999.

2. Biometric Authentication by Kung, Kak, and Lin, Prentice Hall, 2005.

Course Description

Basic principles and methods for automatic authentication of individuals. Technologies include

face, fingerprint and iris recognition, and speaker verification. Additional topics cover

multimodal biometric and data fusions, system design, performance evaluation, and privacy

issues. Term project required.

Motivation

Biometrics, the science of recovering or verifying a person's identity, measures the physical or behavioral characteristics that make people unique—including fingerprints, an eye's retina or iris, face, hand geometry, signature and voice—and uses those measurements for personal authentication. Biometrics is related to the science of forensics, which uses and interprets physical evidence for legal purposes. The importance of biometrics lies in the fact that traditional means of identification and verification are often unreliable or cumbersome: Passwords are difficult to remember and easy to steal. Keys, driver's licenses, and passports can be lost or forged. The human body and its behavior, on the other hand, can't be forgotten, stolen, forged, or misplaced. Practical uses for biometrics are wide spread and include maintaining the security for both physical and cyber space. In particular, biometrics aids in controlling access to an office, computer network or an ATM, smart cards, wireless communication; confirming the identity of buyers and sellers to make electronic commerce safe and reliable; confirming student identity for distant learning; and safeguarding electronic records related to health care services.

Emerging trends in biometrics include data fusion, augmented cognition, and error analysis. Human behavior, a subject of interest for W5+ (who, where, when, what, why, and HOW) and closely related to Human-Computer Intelligent Interaction (HCII), expands on biometrics and improves performance. The scope for biometrics is multi- and inter- disciplinary as it draws from several fields, ranging from signal and image processing, computer vision and pattern recognition, speech processing, machine learning, to cognitive and neurosciences.

Follow – up

Graduate Certificate in Biometrics http://cs.gmu.edu/programs/compbiocertificate.html

CS 775 / IT 844 – Pattern Recognition – Spring ‘2007

Doctoral Dissertation

Grading

Homework à 15%

Midterm à Thursday, March 23 à 20%

(Team) Term Project à April 27 and May 4 à 40%.

Final à Thursday,, May 11 à 25 %

Topics

System Design.

Sensing and Data Collection.

Subspace Methods for Representation.

Predictive Learning.

Authentication and Identification.

Detection and Tracking.

Data Fusion.

Augmented Cognition.

Performance Evaluation and Error Analysis.

Security and Privacy.