Abstract
The rising challenges in the field of iris recognition, concerning the development of accurate recognition algorithms using images acquired under an unconstrained set of conditions, is leading to the a renewed interest in the area. Although several works already report excellent recognition rates, these values are obtained by acquiring images in very controlled environments. The use of such systems in daily security activities, such as airport security and bank account management, is therefore hindered by the inherent unconstrained nature under which images are to be acquired. The proposed work focused on mutual context information from iris centre and iris limbic contour to perform robust and accurate iris segmentation in noisy images. A random subset of the UBIRIS.v2 database was tested with a promising E1 classification rate of 0.0109.

Abstract
Biometric systems based on iris are vulnerable to several attacks, particularly direct attacks consisting on the presentation of a fake iris to the sensor. The development of iris liveness detection techniques is crucial for the deployment of iris biometric applications in daily life specially in the mobile biometric field. The 1st Mobile Iris Liveness Detection Competition (MobILive) was organized in the context of IJCB2014 in order to record recent advances in iris liveness detection. The goal for (MobILive) was to contribute to the state of the art of this particular subject. This competition covered the most common and simple spoofing attack in which printed images from an authorized user are presented to the sensor by a non-authorized user in order to obtain access. The benchmark dataset was the MobBIOfake database which is composed by a set of 800 iris images and its corresponding fake copies (obtained from printed images of the original ones captured with the same handheld device and in similar conditions). In this paper we present a brief description of the methods and the results achieved by the six participants in the competition. © 2014 IEEE.

Abstract
The use of images acquired in unconstrained scenarios is giving rise to new challenges in the field of iris recognition. Many works in literature reported excellent results in both iris segmentation and recognition but mostly with images acquired in controlled conditions. The intention to broaden the field of application of iris recognition, such as airport security or personal identification in mobile devices, is therefore hindered by the inherent unconstrained nature under which images are to be acquired. The proposed work focuses on mutual context information from iris centre and iris limbic and pupillary contours to perform robust and accurate iris segmentation in noisy images. The developed algorithm was tested on the MobBIO database with a promising 96% segmentation accuracy for the limbic contour.

Abstract
Iris liveness detection methods have been developed to overcome the vulnerability of iris biometric systems to spoofing attacks. In the literature, it is typically assumed that a known attack modality will be perpetrated. Then liveness models are designed using labelled samples from both real/live and fake/spoof distributions, the latter derived from the assumed attack modality. In this work it is argued that a comprehensive modelling of the spoof samples is not possible in a real-world scenario where the attack modality cannot be known with a high degree of certainty. In fact making this assumption will render the liveness detection system more vulnerable to attacks that were not included in the original training. To provide a more realistic evaluation, this work proposes: a) testing the binary models with unknown spoof samples that were not present in the training step; b) the use of a single-class classification designing the classifier by modelling only the distribution of live samples. The results obtained support the assertion that many evaluation methods from the literature are misleading and may lead to optimistic estimates of the robustness of liveness detection in practical use cases.

Abstract
Fingerprint segmentation is a crucial step of an automatic fingerprint identification system, since an accurate segmentation promote both the elimination of spurious minutiae close to the foreground boundaries and the reduction of the computation time of the following steps. In this paper, a new, and more robust fingerprint segmentation algorithm is proposed. The main novelty is the introduction of a more robust binarization process in the framework, mainly based on the fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm. Experimental results demonstrate significant benchmark progress on three existing FVC datasets.

Abstract
Biometric systems are vulnerable to different kinds of attacks. Particularly, the systems based on iris are vulnerable to direct attacks consisting on the presentation of a fake iris to the sensor trying to access the system as it was from a legitimate user. The analysis of some countermeasures against this type of attacking scheme is the problem addressed in the present paper. Several state-of-the-art methods were implemented and included in a feature selection framework so as to determine the best cardinality and the best subset that conducts to the highest classification rate. Three different classifiers were used: Discriminant analysis, K nearest neighbours and Support Vector Machines. The implemented methods were tested in existing databases for iris liveness purposes (Biosec and Clarkson) and in a new fake database which was constructed for evaluation of iris liveness detection methods in the mobile scenario. The results suggest that this new database is more challenging than the others. Therefore, improvements are required in this line of research to achieve good performance in real world mobile applications.