Welcome to the
Second International Workshop on Multimodal User Authentication (MMUA 2006),
being held in Toulouse, France on May 11-12, 2006. MMUA 2006 is the second
edition of the workshop, after a previous meeting organized in Santa Barbara in
December 2003.
More and more
applications are being developed that require reliable person identification or
identity verification. The two traditional approaches to automatic person
recognition, namely the knowledge-based approach which relies on
something that one knows such as a password, and the token-based
approach which relies on something that one has such as a badge, have obvious
shortcomings: passwords might be forgotten or guessed and badges might be lost
or stolen. Biometrics – which is the discipline concerned with “the
automatic identification or identity verification of an individual based on physiological
and/or behavioral characteristics” – is an alternative to these
traditional approaches, as a biometric attribute is inherent to each person; it
cannot be forgotten or lost and might be difficult to forge.
Many applications
concentrate on one biometric modality only (e.g., face or fingerprint).
However, the rational for multimodal user authentication is that no single
biometric is generally considered sufficiently accurate, universal and
user-acceptable for any given application. Authentication systems that are
robust in natural environments (e.g., in the presence of noise and illumination
changes) cannot rely on a single modality. In contrast, multimodal user
authentication can provide a more balanced solution to the security and
convenience of many applications. Multimodal user authentication provides a
practical and viable approach for overcoming the performance and acceptability
barriers to the widespread adoption of authentication systems. While progress
has been made in this area, due to the inherent cross-disciplinary research of
this field, it is important to continue to provide a forum for researchers from
different disciplines, so that information can be shared and collaborations can
be established. This led us to organize this second workshop on multimodal user
authentication.
All papers
contained in this volume were selected for presentation at MMUA 2006 after a
thorough peer review process, under the responsibility of the International
Program Committee, by expert reviewers in their respective fields: our
gratitude goes to these reviewers. Altogether 21 high quality papers were
selected in this volume out of 35 submissions around the world. The papers
included in this volume represent 13 countries from 4 continents: Australia,
China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, United Kingdom, Singapore,
Spain, Switzerland and United States of America. These papers cover most of the
major issues of current research interest.
In addition to the
selected papers, three invited presentations are to be given by distinguished
speakers during the workshop: “Multi-modal Biometrics: Orthogonal, Independent,
and Collaborative” by Kevin Bowyer (University of Notre-Dame, U.S.A.), “Fusing
Noncontact Biometrics: Face, Gait and Ear” by Marc Nixon (University of
Southampton, U.K.) and “Government Initiatives Concerning Biometric
Authentication and Their Impact on the Industry and International Standards” by
Bill Perry (Emerging Technology Service LTD, U.K.). We would like to give a
special thanks to these three invited speakers who all accepted with enthusiasm
the challenge of preparing overview talks.
We would like to acknowledge
the cooperative efforts of the International Speech Communication Association
(ISCA) and EURASIP, and the financial support from the SIMILAR EU Network of Excellence, the
BIOSECURE EU Network of
Excellence, FRANCE TELECOM R&D, University Paul Sabatier of Toulouse and
Région Midi-Pyrénées.
Finally, we would
like to thank all the people who helped us here at IRIT: Véronique Debats,
Katalyn Sangla, Jean-Pierre Barritaud, Jean-Pierre Ceccatto, Jean-Claude
Debelle, Jean Frontin and Christophe Rosa.
We hope that this
workshop is successful from both a technical and social point of view and that
the contacts and discussions you have will be beneficial for your future
research or business.
The Workshop
Organizing Committee:
Jean-François
Bonastre, Jean-Luc Dugelay, Isabelle Ferrané, Jean-Claude Junqua,