This work summarises and reports the results of the second Presentation Attack Detection competition on ID cards. This new version includes new elements compared to the previous one. (1) An automatic evaluation platform was enabled for automatic benchmarking; (2) Two tracks were proposed in order to evaluate algorithms and datasets respectively; and (3) A new ID card dataset was shared with Track 1 teams to serve as the baseline dataset for the training and optimisation. The Hochschule Darmstadt, Fraunhofer-IGD, and Facephi company jointly organised this challenge. 20 teams were registered, and 74 submitted models were evaluated. For Track 1, the "Dragons" team reached first place with an Average Ranking and Equal Error rate (EER) of (AVRank) of 40.48% and 11.44% EER, respectively. For the more challenging approach in Track 2, the "Incode" team reached the best results with an AVRank of 14.76% and 6.36% EER, improving on the results of the first edition of 74.30% and 21.87% EER, respectively. These results suggest that PAD on ID cards is improving, but it is still a challenging problem related to the number of images, especially of bona fide images.

This paper proposes a new method to estimate behavioural curves from Near-Infra-Red (NIR) iris images for classifying Fitness for Duty using a biometric capture device. Fitness for Duty (FFD) techniques detect whether a subject is Fit to safely perform a given task, which means no reduced alertness condition and security, or the subject is unfit, that could impact a reduced alertness condition by sleepiness or consumption of alcohol and drugs. The analysis showed essential differences in pupil and iris behaviour to classify the workers in “Fit” or “Unfit” conditions. The best results can distinguish subjects robustly under alcohol, drug consumption, and sleep conditions. The Multi-Layer-Perceptron and Gradient Boosted Machine reached the best results in all groups with an overall accuracy for Fit and Unfit classes of 74.0% and 75.5%, respectively. These results open a new application for iris capture devices.

Bias and fairness of biometric algorithms have been key topics of research in recent years, mainly due to the societal, legal and ethical implications of potentially unfair decisions made by automated decision-making models. A considerable amount of work has been done on this topic across different biometric modalities, aiming at better understanding the main sources of algorithmic bias or devising mitigation measures. In this work, we contribute to these efforts and present the first study investigating bias and fairness of sclera segmentation models. Although sclera segmentation techniques represent a key component of sclera-based biometric systems with a considerable impact on the overall recognition performance, the presence of different types of biases in sclera segmentation methods is still underexplored. To address this limitation, we describe the results of a group evaluation effort (involving seven research groups), organized to explore the performance of recent sclera segmentation models within a common experimental framework and study performance differences (and bias), originating from various demographic as well as environmental factors. Using five diverse datasets, we analyze seven independently developed sclera segmentation models in different experimental configurations. The results of our experiments suggest that there are significant differences in the overall segmentation performance across the seven models and that among the considered factors, ethnicity appears to be the biggest cause of bias. Additionally, we observe that training with representative and balanced data does not necessarily lead to less biased results. Finally, we find that in general there appears to be a negative correlation between the amount of bias observed (due to eye color, ethnicity and acquisition device) and the overall segmentation performance, suggesting that advances in the field of semantic segmentation may also help with mitigating bias.

For iris recognition in non-cooperative environments, iris segmentation has been regarded as the first most important challenge still open to the biometric community, affecting all downstream tasks from normalization to recognition. In recent years, deep learning technologies have gained significant popularity among various computer vision tasks and also been introduced in iris biometrics, especially iris segmentation. To investigate recent developments and attract more interest of researchers in the iris segmentation method, we organized the 2021 NIR Iris Challenge Evaluation in Non-cooperative Environments: Segmentation and Localization (NIR-ISL 2021) at the 2021 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2021). The challenge was used as a public platform to assess the performance of iris segmentation and localization methods on Asian and African NIR iris images captured in non-cooperative environments. The three best-performing entries achieved solid and satisfactory iris segmentation and localization results in most cases, and their code and models have been made publicly available for reproducibility research.

The paper presents a summary of the 2020 Sclera Segmentation Benchmarking Competition (SSBC), the 7th in the series of group benchmarking efforts centred around the problem of sclera segmentation. Different from previous editions, the goal of SSBC 2020 was to evaluate the performance of sclera-segmentation models on images captured with mobile devices. The competition was used as a platform to assess the sensitivity of existing models to i) differences in mobile devices used for image capture and ii) changes in the ambient acquisition conditions. 26 research groups registered for SSBC 2020, out of which 13 took part in the final round and submitted a total of 16 segmentation models for scoring. These included a wide variety of deep-learning solutions as well as one approach based on standard image processing techniques. Experiments were conducted with three recent datasets. Most of the segmentation models achieved relatively consistent performance across images captured with different mobile devices (with slight differences across devices), but struggled most with low-quality images captured in challenging ambient conditions, i.e., in an indoor environment and with poor lighting.

The paper describes the system developed by researchers from MIT for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Virtual Robotics Challenge (VRC), held in June 2013. The VRC was the first competition in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), a program that aims to “develop ground robotic capabilities to execute complex tasks in dangerous, degraded, human-engineered environments”. The VRC required teams to guide a model of Boston Dynamics' humanoid robot, Atlas, through driving, walking, and manipulation tasks in simulation. Team MIT's user interface, the Viewer, provided the operator with a unified representation of all available information. A 3D rendering of the robot depicted its most recently estimated body state with respect to the surrounding environment, represented by point clouds and texture-mapped meshes as sensed by on-board LIDAR and fused over time.