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.

Face recognition systems (FRS) are vulnerable to different kinds of attacks. Morphing attack combines multiple face images to obtain a single face image that can verify equally against all contributing subjects. Various Morphing Attack Detection (MAD) algorithms have been proposed in recent years albeit limited generalizability. We present a new approach for MAD in this work with better generalization than state-of-the-art (SOTA) algorithms. We propose an end-to-end multi-stage encoder-decoder network for learning the residuals of morphing process to detect attacks. Leveraging the residuals, we learn an efficient classifier using cross-entropy loss and asymmetric loss. The use of asymmetric loss in our approach is motivated by imbalanced distribution of morphs and bona fides. An extensive set of experiments are conducted on five different datasets consisting of two landmark based and three Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based morphs in various settings such as digital, print-scan and print-scan-compression. We first demonstrate a near-ideal performance of the proposed MAD with Detection Equal Error Rate (D-EER) of 0% in the best case and 2.58% in the worst case in the digital domain in closed-set protocol, i.e., known attacks. Further, we demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach on 60 different combinations where the testing set contains unknown morphing attacks in open-set protocol to illustrate the generalization ability of our proposed approach. Through training the proposed approach on landmark-based morph generation data alone, we obtain an EER of 3.59% in the best case and 12.89% in the worst case for morphed images in the digital domain, reducing the error rates from 45.67% and 30.23% respectively, in open-set protocol. We further present an extensive analysis of the proposed approach through Class Activation Maps (CAM) to explain the decisions using by making use of three complementary CAM analysis.

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.