The goal of this effort is to develop 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. The biometrics and forensic group at GMU led by Professor Harry Wechsler has been actively engaged in face recognition research for the last 8 years under the FERET government sponsored R&D program. The R&D carried out at GMU involves face recognition, contents - based image retrieval, surveillance, ID verification, gender and ethnic classification, data compression, human studies, performance evaluation, and most recently video processing and interpretation of human activity.

Professor Wechsler has organized and directed for NATO an Advanced Study  Institute on Face Recognition : From Theory to Applications, held in Stirling, UK in 1997. The proceedings of the meeting have been published by Springer - Verlag in 1998. 20

Relevant Courses : CS 682, INFT 844,..

 Faculty :  Jim Chen,  Zoran Duric,  Harry Wechsler