Swiss Center for Biometrics

Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing

The Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing offers unmatched opportunities for collaboration and cooperation between industry and academia in Europe and worldwide, in the domain of biometric security.

As part of Idiap Research Institute, the Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing is a center established to advance biometric security technologies, mainly by facilitating collaboration between industry and academia. Its core missions are:

  • to carry out high quality research
  • to train talented engineers and researchers
  • to foster technology transfer from academia to industry
  • to propose certification, evaluation and testing services in the domain of biometric security.

The center ensures an environment of mutual benefit between Idiap researchers and affiliates (industry partners). While researchers create research proposals for funding consideration according to the affiliates' needs, the affiliates fund and drive the research carried out by Idiap Research Institute.

This structure helps industry partners to gain unparalleled access to cutting-edge researchers and their expertise, and supports researchers to acquire the opportunity to bid for funding from driven and relevant organizations. Through this multidisciplinary environment, it is expected that organizations will enjoy a golden age of biometric development, leading to rapid improvements in current biometric technology and the realization of novel technologies.

What is biometrics?

Biometrics is the science of measuring and analyzing physiological and/or behavioral characteristics of humans for automatic recognition purposes. Offering a more convenient way to identify an individual than passwords or badges, biometric security systems such as e-passports or biometric-enabled mobile devices are becoming increasingly common.

Research on biometrics focuses on the recognition aspect and strives to make progress in:

- face recognition
- fingerprint recognition
- speaker recognition
- iris recognition
- vein recognition

It also takes other related matters in hand, such as:

- soft biometrics (e.g. eye color, height, scars, marks and tattoos)
- age estimation
- gender recognition
- presentation attack detection (aka anti-spoofing)
- morphing attack detection
- deepfakes detection
- privacy preservation to protect biometric data (i.e. template protection)
- fairness (i.e. bias removal) and interpretability of deep learning based biometric systems.

The Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing is supported by:

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