Ensuring equitable Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare demands systems that make unbiased decisions across all demographic groups, bridging technical innovation with ethical principles. Foundation Models (FMs), trained on vast datasets through self-supervised learning, enable efficient adaptation across medical imaging tasks while reducing dependency on labeled data. These models demonstrate potential for enhancing fairness, though significant challenges remain in achieving consistent performance across demographic groups. Our review indicates that effective bias mitigation in FMs requires systematic interventions throughout all stages of development. While previous approaches focused primarily on model-level bias mitigation, our analysis reveals that fairness in FMs requires integrated interventions throughout the development pipeline, from data documentation to deployment protocols. This comprehensive framework advances current knowledge by demonstrating how systematic bias mitigation, combined with policy engagement, can effectively address both technical and institutional barriers to equitable AI in healthcare. The development of equitable FMs represents a critical step toward democratizing advanced healthcare technologies, particularly for underserved populations and regions with limited medical infrastructure and computational resources.

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.

The objective of this study is to showcase a pipeline able to perform fully automated grading of retinal inflammation based on a standardised, clinically-validated grading scheme, namely the Tugal-Tuktun scale. The application of such scale has so far been hindered by the the amount of time required to (manually) apply it in clinical settings. Our dataset includes 3,205 fluorescein angiography images, from 148 patients and 242 eyes, from the uveitis department of Jules Gonin Eye Hospital. The data were automatically extracted from a medical device (Heidelberg Spectralis), in hospital settings. Images were graded by a medical expert. We focused specifically on one type of inflammation, namely retinal vasculitis. Our pipeline comprises both learning-based models (Pasa model with F1 score = 0.81, AUC = 0.86), and a computer vision intensity-based approach to serve as a baseline (F1 score = 0.57, AUC = 0.66). A recall of up to 0.833, computed on an independent test set, is comparable to the scores obtained by available state-of-the-art approaches. Here we present the first fully automated pipeline for the grading of retinal vasculitis from raw medical images that is applicable to a real-world clinical data.

Face recognition is a mainstream biometric authentication method. However, the vulnerability to presentation attacks (a.k.a. spoofing) limits its usability in unsupervised applications. Even though there are many methods available for tackling presentation attacks (PA), most of them fail to detect sophisticated attacks such as silicone masks. As the quality of presentation attack instruments improves over time, achieving reliable PA detection with visual spectra alone remains very challenging. We argue that analysis in multiple channels might help to address this issue. In this context, we propose a multi-channel Convolutional Neural Network-based approach for presentation attack detection (PAD). We also introduce the new Wide Multi-Channel presentation Attack (WMCA) database for face PAD which contains a wide variety of 2D and 3D presentation attacks for both impersonation and obfuscation attacks. Data from different channels such as color, depth, near-infrared, and thermal are available to advance the research in face PAD. The proposed method was compared with feature-based approaches and found to outperform the baselines achieving an ACER of 0.3% on the introduced dataset. The database and the software to reproduce the results are made available publicly.

The task of Heterogeneous Face Recognition consists in matching face images that are sensed in different domains, such as sketches to photographs (visual spectra images), and thermal images to photographs or near-infrared images to photographs. In this paper, we suggest that the high-level features of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks trained in visual spectra images are potentially domain independent and can be used to encode faces sensed in different image domains. A generic framework for Heterogeneous Face Recognition is proposed by adapting Deep Convolutional Neural Networks low-level features in, so-called, Domain Specific Units. The adaptation using the Domain Specific Units allows the learning of shallow feature detectors specific for each new image domain. Furthermore, it handles its transformation to a generic face space shared between all image domains. Experiments carried out with four different face databases covering three different image domains show substantial improvements, in terms of recognition rate, surpassing the state-of-the-art for most of them. This work is made reproducible: all the source code, scores, and trained models of this approach are made publicly available.

With biometrics playing the role of a password which cannot be replaced if stolen, the necessity of establishing counter-measures to biometric spoofing attacks has been recognized. Regardless of the biometric mode, the typical approach of antispoofing systems is to classify the biometric evidence based on features discriminating between real accesses and spoofing attacks. For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, this paper studies the amount of client-specific information within these features and how it affects the performance of antispoofing systems. We make use of this information to build two client-specific antispoofing solutions, one relying on a generative and another one on a discriminative paradigm. The proposed methods, tested on a set of state-of-the-art antispoofing features for the face mode, outperform the client-independent approaches with up to 50% relative improvement and exhibit better generalization capabilities on unseen types of spoofing attacks.

While more accurate and reliable than ever, the trustworthiness of biometric verification systems is compromised by the emergence of spoofing attacks. Responding to this threat, numerous research publications address isolated spoofing detection, resulting in efficient counter-measures for many biometric modes. However, an important, but often overlooked issue regards their engagement into a verification task and how to measure their impact on the verification systems themselves. A novel evaluation framework for verification systems under spoofing attacks, called expected performance and spoofability framework, is the major contribution of this paper. Its purpose is to serve for an objective comparison of different verification systems with regards to their verification performance and vulnerability to spoofing, taking into account the system’s application-dependent susceptibility to spoofing attacks and cost of the errors. The convenience of the proposed open-source framework is demonstrated for the face mode, by comparing the security guarantee of four baseline face verification systems before and after they are secured with antispoofing algorithms.

Bob is a free signal processing and machine learning toolbox originally developed by the Biometrics group at Idiap Research Institute, Switzerland. The toolbox is designed to meet the needs of researchers by reducing development time and efficiently processing data. Firstly, Bob provides a researcher-friendly Python environment for rapid development. Secondly, efficient processing of large amounts of multimedia data is provided by fast C++ implementations of identified bottlenecks. The Python environment is integrated seamlessly with the C++ library, which ensures the library is easy to use and extensible. Thirdly, Bob supports reproducible research through its integrated experimental protocols for several databases. Finally, a strong emphasis is placed on code clarity, documentation, and thorough unit testing. Bob is thus an attractive resource for researchers due to this unique combination of ease of use, efficiency, extensibility and transparency. Bob is an open-source library and an ongoing community effort.

A common technique to by-pass 2-D face recognition systems is to use photographs of spoofed identities. Unfortunately, research in counter-measures to this type of attack have not kept-up even if such threats have been known for nearly a decade, there seems to exist no consensus on best practices, techniques or protocols for developing and testing spoofing-detectors for face recognition. We attribute the reason for this delay, partly, to the unavailability of public databases and protocols to study solutions and compare results. To this purpose we introduce the publicly available PRINT-ATTACK database and exemplify how to use its companion protocol with a motion-based algorithm that detects correlations between the person's head movements and the scene context. The results are to be used as basis for comparison to other counter-measure techniques. The PRINT-ATTACK database contains 200 videos of real- accesses and 200 videos of spoof attempts using printed photographs of 50 different identities.

Spoofing identities using photographs is one of the most common techniques to attack 2-D face recognition systems. There seems to exist no comparative studies of different techniques using the same protocols and data. The motivation behind this competition is to compare the performance of different state-of-the-art algorithms on the same database using a unique evaluation method. Six different teams from universities around the world have participated in the contest. Use of one or multiple techniques from motion, texture analysis and liveness detection appears to be the common trend in this competition. Most of the algorithms are able to clearly separate spoof attempts from real accesses. The results suggest the investigation of more complex attacks.