Soft 2014 - 2014 International Workshop on Soft Biometrics

Soft biometrics are human characteristics providing categorical information about people such as age, beard, gender, glasses, ethnicity, eye/hair color, length of arms and legs, height, weight, skin/hair color, gait and gestures, accent, etc. In contrast to "hard" biometrics, which includes face, fingerprint, retina, iris, voice etc., and are generally unique and permanent personal characteristics, soft biometrics provide some vague physical or behavioral information which is not necessarily permanent or distinctive. Such soft biometric traits are usually easier to capture from a distance and do not require cooperation from the subjects. Whilst they cannot provide robust authentication, they can be used for improving the verification performance of biometric recognition systems. Other applications of soft biometrics include human-machine interaction, content based image/video retrieval, person re-identification, etc. Research on soft biometrics is still in its infancy despite the vast potential applications. This one-day workshop will bring together researchers working not only on soft biometrics but also on related disciplines to present and discuss the recent developments in the field. The event aims also at encouraging exchanges, interactions and potential collaboration between the potential participants. The workshop will hopefully open a debate on new opportunities and new challenges in the area, and at unifying the efforts toward the development of adequate tools, protocols and databases for evaluating and monitoring the progress in the field of soft biometrics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first workshop devoted to the emerging topic of soft biometrics.
Topics
The topics of interest for this workshop include, but are not limited to:
Methods for estimating/extracting soft biometric traits including age, beard, gender, glasses, ethnicity, eye/hair color, length of arms and legs, height, weight, skin/hair color, gait and gestures, accent, scars, tattoos, kinship, etc.
Novel soft biometric traits
Image and video based soft biometrics
Soft biometrics in human-machine interaction
Kinship verification from face and body images
Extracting soft biometrics from range data
Extraction of soft biometric attributes from low quality surveillance videos
Image/video retrieval using soft biometrics
Person re-identification using soft biometrics
Improving person authentication using soft biometrics
Studying the reliability of soft biometric traits
Soft biometrics in forensic applications
Soft biometric systems
Databases and tools for evaluating soft biometric systems
Extracting soft biometrics from forensic scenarios
Combination of soft biometrics with other forensic evidence
Ethical and societal implications of using soft biometrics