Special Issue on Human Detection and Recognition

W ITH A very security-conscious society, biomet-rics-based authentication and identification have become one of the key technologies for many important applications. It is generally believed that biometrics can provide the necessary accuracy and reliability for applications, such as access control. Biometrics research and technology continue to mature rapidly, driven by pressing industrial and government needs. As the number and types of biometrics architectures and sensors increase, the need to disseminate research results increases as well. This special issue is intended to be positioned at the frontier of biometrics research and showcase the excellent advanced work underway at academic and private research organizations as well as government laboratories. A biometrics system may involve a variety of techniques from signal processing, image processing, image analysis, pattern recognition, human vision, and machine learning. As many of the applications require a higher level of performance that is not feasible with a single biometrics, it is believed that fusing multiple biometrics or an ensemble of algorithms will provide a wider coverage of the population who may not be able to provide a single biometrics at all times. This will also improve the security of the biometric systems against spoof attacks. for integration and evidence accumulation; attacks on biometric systems and the determination of liveness; normalization techniques involved in fusion techniques; signal-processing and machine-learning techniques in biometrics fusion; application dependence personalization of multibiometrics systems; theoretical studies showing models for integration; performance modeling, prediction and evaluation of multibiometrics systems; and security improvement assessment for multibio-metrics systems. The evolution of standards, protocols, competition, and organized challenges, availability of large publicly available databases and score files, performance baselines in single and multibiometric systems, and a balance between the needs of security and privacy with a wide variety of real-world applications are important issues in single or multibiometrics systems. This special issue addresses some aspects of the above research issues dealing with different sensing modalities with the goal of improving performance of biometrics over existing techniques. In the following, we present a synopsis of the papers selected for this special issue on human detection and recognition using a range of biometrics and their associated techniques. PAPERS IN THIS ISSUE The goals of this special issue are to provide the reader with an overview of the state of the art in this field and to collect significant research results. All of the papers were reviewed in accordance with the transactions policy. …