LivDet-Iris 2025 is the sixth edition of the iris liveness detection competition. Held every two to three years, the competition aims to foster the development of robust algorithms capable of detecting a wide range of physically-and digitally-presented attacks in iris biometrics. The 2025 edition obtained the largest number of submissions in the history of the competition: ten algorithms from five institutions, and one commercial iris recognition system. LivDet-Iris 2025 also introduced new tasks compared to previous editions: (Task 1) a benchmark offered by an industry partner, (Task 2) morphed iris images, in which two different-identity samples were blended into one image, and (Task 3) evaluation of presentation attack detection robustness against advanced manufacturing techniques for textured contact lenses. This edition, for the first time in the series, offers a systematic testing of a commercial iris recognition system (software and hardware) using physical artifacts presented to the sensor. Dermalog-Iris team submitted algorithms that won all tasks, achieving the area under the ROC curve of 90.57%, 68.23% and 99.99% in tasks 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Additionally, we include results for baseline algorithms, based on modern deep convolutional neural networks and trained with all available public datasets of iris images representing bona fide samples and anomalies (physical attacks, eye diseases, post-mortem cases, and synthetically-generated iris images). Test samples created for tasks 2 and 3, and baseline models are made available to offer the state-of-the-art benchmark for iris liveness detection.

This paper presents a summary of the 2025 Sclera Segmentation Benchmarking Competition (SSBC), which focused on the development of privacy-preserving sclera-segmentation models trained using synthetically generated ocular images. The goal of the competition was to evaluate how well models trained on synthetic data perform in comparison to those trained on real-world datasets. The competition featured two tracks: (i) one relying solely on synthetic data for model development, and (ii) one combining/mixing synthetic with (a limited amount of) real-world data. A total of nine research groups submitted diverse segmentation models, employing a variety of architectural designs, including transformer-based solutions, lightweight models, and segmentation networks guided by generative frameworks. Experiments were conducted across three evaluation datasets containing both synthetic and real-world images, collected under diverse conditions. Results show that models trained entirely on synthetic data can achieve competitive performance, particularly when dedicated training strategies are employed, as evidenced by the top performing models that achieved F1scores of over 0.8 in the synthetic data track. Moreover, performance gains in the mixed track were often driven more by methodological choices rather than by the inclusion of real data, highlighting the promise of synthetic data for privacy-aware biometric development. The code and data for the competition is available at: https://github.com/dariant/SSBC_2025.

While Vision Transformer (ViT)-based methods have significantly improved the performance of various vision tasks in natural scenes, progress in iris recognition remains limited. In addition, the human iris contains unique characters that are distinct from natural scenes. To remedy this, this paper investigates a dedicated Transformer framework, termed IrisFormer, for iris recognition and attempts to improve the accuracy by combining the contextual modeling ability of ViT and iris-specific optimization to learn robust, fine-grained, and discriminative features. Specifically, to achieve rotation invariance in iris recognition, we employ relative position encoding instead of regular absolute position encoding for each iris image token, and a horizontal pixel-shifting strategy is utilized during training for data augmentation. Then, to enhance the model's robustness against local distortions such as occlusions and reflections, we randomly mask some tokens during training to force the model to learn representative identity features from only part of the image. Finally, considering that fine-grained features are more discriminative in iris recognition, we retain the entire token sequence for patch-wise feature matching instead of using the standard single classification token. Experiments on three popular datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves competitive performance under both intra- and inter-dataset testing protocols.

This paper presents the summary of the Sclera Segmentation and Joint Recognition Benchmarking Competition (SSRBC 2023) held in conjunction with IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2023). Different from the previous editions of the competition, SSRBC 2023 not only explored the performance of the latest and most advanced sclera segmentation models, but also studied the impact of segmentation quality on recognition performance. Five groups took part in SSRBC 2023 and submitted a total of six segmentation models and one recognition technique for scoring. The submitted solutions included a wide variety of conceptually diverse deep-learning models and were rigorously tested on three publicly available datasets, i.e., MASD, SBVPI and MOBIUS. Most of the segmentation models achieved encouraging segmentation and recognition performance. Most importantly, we observed that better segmentation results always translate into better verification performance.

This paper presents a summary of the Competition on Face Presentation Attack Detection Based on Privacy-aware Synthetic Training Data (SynFacePAD 2023) held at the 2023 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB 2023). The competition attracted a total of 8 participating teams with valid submissions from academia and industry. The competition aimed to motivate and attract solutions that target detecting face presentation attacks while considering synthetic-based training data motivated by privacy, legal and ethical concerns associated with personal data. To achieve that, the training data used by the participants was limited to synthetic data provided by the organizers. The submitted solutions presented innovations and novel approaches that led to outperforming the considered baseline in the investigated benchmarks.

Sclera segmentation is a crucial step in sclera recognition, which has been greatly advanced by Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). However, when dealing with non-ideal eye images, many existing CNN-based approaches are still prone to failure. One major reason is that due to the limited range of receptive fields, CNNs are difficult to effectively model global semantic relevance and thus robustly resist noise interference. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel two-stream hybrid model, named Sclera-TransFuse, to integrate classical ResNet-34 and recently emerging Swin Transformer encoders. Specially, the self-attentive Swin Transformer has shown a strong ability in capturing long-range spatial dependencies and has a hierarchical structure similar to CNNs. The dual encoders firstly extract coarse- and fine-grained feature representations at hierarchical stages, separately. Then a novel Cross-Domain Fusion (CDF) module based on information interaction and self-attention mechanism is introduced to efficiently fuse the multi-scale features extracted from dual encoders. Finally, the fused features are progressively upsampled and aggregated to predict the sclera masks in the decoder meanwhile deep supervision strategies are employed to learn intermediate feature representations better and faster. Experimental results show that Sclera-TransFuse achieves state-of-the-art performance on various sclera segmentation benchmarks. Additionally, a UBIRIS.v2 subset of 683 eye images with manually labeled sclera masks, and our codes are publicly available to the community through https://github.com/Ihqqq/Sclera-TransFuse.

This paper presents the summary report on the DeepFake Game Competition on Visual Realism Assessment (DFGC-VRA). Deep-learning based face-swap videos, also known as deepfakes, are becoming more and more realistic and deceiving. The malicious usage of these face-swap videos has caused wide concerns. There is a ongoing deepfake game between its creators and detectors, with the human in the loop. The research community has been focusing on the automatic detection of these fake videos, but the assessment of their visual realism, as perceived by human eyes, is still an unexplored dimension. Visual realism assessment, or VRA, is essential for assessing the potential impact that may be brought by a specific face-swap video, and it is also useful as a quality metric to compare different face-swap methods. This is the third edition of DFGC competitions, which focuses on the new visual realism assessment topic, different from previous ones that compete creators versus detectors. With this competition, we conduct a comprehensive study of the SOTA performance on the new task. We also release our MindSpore codes to further facilitate research in this field (https://github.com/bomb2peng/DFGC-VRA-benckmark).

This paper describes the results of the 2023 edition of the “LivDet” series of iris presentation attack detection (PAD) competitions. New elements in this fifth competition include (1) GAN-generated iris images as a category of presentation attack instruments (PAI), and (2) an evaluation of human accuracy at detecting PAI as a reference benchmark. Clarkson University and the University of Notre Dame contributed image datasets for the competition, composed of samples representing seven different PAI categories, as well as baseline PAD algorithms. Fraunhofer IGD, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, and Hochschule Darmstadt contributed results for a total of eight PAD algorithms to the competition. Accuracy results are analyzed by different PAI types, and compared to human accuracy. Overall, the Fraunhofer IGD algorithm, using an attention-based pixel-wise binary supervision network, showed the best-weighted accuracy results (average classification error rate of 37.31%), while the Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture’s algorithm won when equal weights for each PAI were given (average classification rate of 22.15%). These results suggest that iris PAD is still a challenging problem.

In recent years, unconstraint iris biometric is becoming more prevalent due to its wide range of user applications. But since it allows less user co-operation, it presents numerous challenges to the iris preprocessing task of localisation and segmentation (ILS). To address these challenges, many ILS techniques have been proposed with the deep learning CNN based approaches been the most effective. Training the CNN is data intensive and most of the existing CNN based ILS adopt general purpose CNN without any iris specific guidance. However, the available iris dataset comprises of small subsets with labelled images. As such, the existing CNN models can be less effective as they are trained with these dataset. Hence, in this paper, we propose a guided CNN based ILS technique termed IrisGuideNet by incorporating known iris specific heuristics into the network pipeline. IrisGuideNet has an encoder-decoder structure designed to be invariant to translation and rotation and can capture iris at multiple scales. To address the iris limited data problem, unlike the existing CNN based ILS, during the training process, we adopt the deep supervision technique, employ hybrid losses and introduce a novel iris specific heuristics named Iris Regularization Term (IRT) in other to effectively train the network. At inference, we introduce a novel Iris Infusion Module (IIM) that utilise the geometrical relationships between the ILS outputs to refine the predicted outputs through logical operations. Our models were trained and evaluated with the recently published NIR-ISL Challange * datasets and has proven to be effective as it has outperformed most of the participating models across all the database categories in the competition.

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.

Iris recognition is one of the most accurate and reliable biometric technologies. However, due to the high collection costs and privacy of the iris, it is difficult to build a large-scale iris image database for training iris recognition models. This paper proposes a novel iris image generation algorithm which can produce numerous intra- and inter-class iris images. By using contrastive learning, we disentangle identity-related features (e.g., iris texture, left or right eye) and condition-variant features (e.g., pupil size, iris exposure ratio) in the generated images. This disentanglement facilitates identity control over synthetic iris images. Since the iris has the multi-degree-of-freedom (MDOF) topology and high-entropy texture, we specially design the dual-channel input protocol to separate the topology and texture of the iris, so that the generator can infer multi-condition iris images while maintaining the unique texture details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves impressive performance in both image quality and identity representation.

Iris images captured in less-constrained environments, especially at long distances often suffer from the interference of low resolution, resulting in the loss of much valid iris texture information for iris recognition. In this paper, we propose a dual-encoder super-resolution generative adversarial network (D-ESRGAN) for compensating texture lost of the raw image meanwhile maintaining the newly generated textures more natural. Specifically, the proposed D-ESRGAN not only integrates the residual CNN encoder to extract local features, but also employs an emerging vision transformer encoder to capture global associative information. The local and global features from two encoders are further fused for the subsequent reconstruction of high-resolution features. During the training, we develop a three-stage strategy to alleviate the problem that generative adversarial networks are prone to collapse. Moreover, to boost the iris recognition performance, we introduce a triplet loss to push away the distance of super-resolved iris images with different IDs, and pull the distance of super-resolved iris images with the same ID much closer. Experimental results on the public CASIA-Iris-distance and CASIA-Iris-M1 datasets show that D-ESRGAN archives better performance than state-of-the-art baselines in terms of both super-resolution image quality metrics and iris recognition metric.

Script event prediction (SEP), aiming at predicting next event from context event sequences (i.e., scripts), has played an important role in many real-world applications such as government decision-making. While most of the existing research only depend on the top-level event prediction, they ignore the influence of other bottom levels or other relationship modeling manners. In this paper, we focus on the problem of SEP via multilevel script learning where the goal of is to explore a multistage, multiprediction and multilevel information fusion model for SEP. This is challenging in (1) simultaneously modeling of the multilevel event relationship semantic information and (2) effectively designing multilevel information fusion strategies. In this paper, we propose a new script event prediction model based on Enhanced Multilevel script learning and Dual Fusion strategies, named EMDF-Net. Specifically, EMDF-Net designs the multilevel (event/chain/segment level) script learning to model both temporal and casual information as well as the rich structural relevance via neural stacking of self-attention mechanism and graph neural networks. Then it proposes dual fusion strategies to fully integrate different-level information by nonlinear feature composition and weighted score fusion. Finally, a deep supervision strategy is utilized to end-to-end train the whole model and provide a good initialization for information fusion. Experimental results on the popular NYT corpus demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of EMDF-Net.

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.

Face recognition is a popular and well-studied area with wide applications in our society. However, racial bias had been proven to be inherent in most State Of The Art (SOTA) face recognition systems. Many investigative studies on face recognition algorithms have reported higher false positive rates of African subjects cohorts than the other cohorts. Lack of large-scale African face image databases in public domain is one of the main restrictions in studying the racial bias problem of face recognition. To this end, we collect a face image database namely CASIA-Face-Africa which contains 38,546 images of 1,183 African subjects. Multi-spectral cameras are utilized to capture the face images under various illumination settings. Demographic attributes and facial expressions of the subjects are also carefully recorded. For landmark detection, each face image in the database is manually labeled with 68 facial keypoints. A group of evaluation protocols are constructed according to different applications, tasks, partitions and scenarios. The performances of SOTA face recognition algorithms without re-training are reported as baselines. The proposed database along with its face landmark annotations, evaluation protocols and preliminary results form a good benchmark to study the essential aspects of face biometrics for African subjects, especially face image preprocessing, face feature analysis and matching, facial expression recognition, sex/age estimation, ethnic classification, face image generation, etc. The database can be downloaded from our website.

This paper proposes a novel, lightweight deep convolutional neural network specifically designed for iris segmentation of noisy images acquired by mobile devices. Unlike previous studies, which only focused on improving the accuracy of segmentation mask using the popular CNN technology, our method is a complete end-to-end iris segmentation solution, i.e., segmentation mask and parameterized pupillary and limbic boundaries of the iris are obtained simultaneously, which further enables CNN-based iris segmentation to be applied in any regular iris recognition systems. By introducing an intermediate pictorial boundary representation, predictions of iris boundaries and segmentation mask have collectively formed a multi-label semantic segmentation problem, which could be well solved by a carefully adapted stacked hourglass network. Experimental results show that our method achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance in both iris segmentation and localization on two challenging mobile iris databases.

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.

Iris images captured in non-cooperative environments often suffer from adverse noise, which challenges many existing iris segmentation methods. To address this problem, this paper proposes a high-efficiency deep learning based iris segmentation approach, named IrisParseNet. Different from many previous CNN-based iris segmentation methods, which only focus on predicting accurate iris masks by following popular semantic segmentation frameworks, the proposed approach is a complete iris segmentation solution, i.e., iris mask and parameterized inner and outer iris boundaries are jointly achieved by actively modeling them into a unified multi-task network. Moreover, an elaborately designed attention module is incorporated into it to improve the segmentation performance. To train and evaluate the proposed approach, we manually label three representative and challenging iris databases, i.e., CASIA.v4-distance, UBIRIS.v2, and MICHE-I, which involve multiple illumination (NIR, VIS) and imaging sensors (long-range and mobile iris cameras), along with various types of noises. Additionally, several unified evaluation protocols are built for fair comparisons. Extensive experiments are conducted on these newly annotated databases, and results show that the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks. Further, as a general drop-in replacement, the proposed iris segmentation method can be used for any iris recognition methodology, and would significantly improve the performance of non-cooperative iris recognition.