Abstract
Fingerprint recognition has been widely studied for more than 45 years and yet it remains an intriguing pattern recognition problem. This paper focuses on the foreground mask estimation which is crucial for the accuracy of a fingerprint recognition system. The method consists of a robust cluster-based fingerprint segmentation framework incorporating an additional step to deal with pixels that were rejected as foreground in a decision considered not reliable enough. These rejected pixels are then further analysed for a more accurate classification. The procedure falls in the paradigm of classification with reject option- a viable option in several real world applications of machine learning and pattern recognition, where the cost of misclassifying observations is high. The present work expands a previous method based on the fuzzy C-means clustering with two variations regarding: i) the filters used; and ii) the clustering method for pixel classification as foreground/background. Experimental results demonstrate improved results on FVC datasets comparing with state-of-the-art methods even including methodologies based on deep learning architectures. © 2018 Gesellschaft fuer Informatik.

Abstract
The spread of biometric applications in mobile devices handled by untrained users opened the door to sources of noise in mobile iris recognition such as larger extent of rotation in the capture and more off-angle imagery not found so extensively in more constrained acquisition settings. As a result of the limitations of the methods in handling such large degrees of freedom there is often an increase in segmentation errors. In this work, a new near-infrared iris dataset captured with a mobile device is evaluated to analyse, in particular, the rotation observed in images and its impact on segmentation and biometric recognition accuracy. For this study a (manually annotated) ground truth segmentation was used which will be published in tandem with the paper. Similarly to most research challenges in biometrics and computer vision in general, deep learning techniques are proving to outperform classical methods in segmentation methods. The utilization of parameterized CNN-based iris segmentations in biometric recognition is a new but promising field. The results presented show how this CNN-based approach outperformed the segmentation traditional methods with respect to overall recognition accuracy for the dataset under investigation.

Abstract
Lung cancer is the world's most lethal type of cancer, being crucial that an early diagnosis is made in order to achieve successful treatments. Computer-aided diagnosis can play an important role in lung nodule detection and on establishing the nodule malignancy likelihood. This paper is a contribution in the design of a learning approach, using computed tomography images. Our methodology involves the measurement of a set of features in the nodular image region, and train classifiers, as K-nearest neighbor or support vector machine (SVM), to compute the malignancy likelihood of lung nodules. For this purpose, the Lung Image Database Consortium and image database resource initiative database is used due to its size and nodule variability, as well as for being publicly available. For training we used both radiologist's labels and annotations and diagnosis data, as biopsy, surgery and follow-up results. We obtained promising results, as an Area Under the Receiver operating characteristic curve value of 0.962 +/- 0.005 and 0.905 +/- 0.04 was achieved for the Radiologists' data and for the Diagnosis data, respectively, using an SVM with an exponential kernel combined with a correlation-based feature selection method.

Abstract
Optical fiber tweezers have been gaining prominence in several applications in Biology and Medicine. Due to their outstanding focusing abilities, they are able to trap and manipulate microparticles, including cells, needing any physical contact and with a low degree of invasiveness to the trapped cell. Recently, we proposed a fiber tweezer configuration based on a polymeric micro-lens on the top of a single mode fiber, obtained by a self-guided photopolymerization process. This configuration is able to both trap and identify the target through the analysis of short-term portions of the back-scattered signal. In this paper, we propose a variant of this fabrication method, capable of producing more robust fiber tips, which produce stronger trapping effects on targets by as much as two to ten fold. These novel lenses maintain the capability of distinguish the different classes of trapped particles based on the back-scattered signal. This novel fabrication method consists in the introduction of a multi mode fiber section on the tip of a single mode (SM) fiber. A detailed description of how relevant fabrication parameters such as the length of the multi mode section and the photopolymerization laser power can be tuned for different purposes (e.g., microparticles trapping only, simultaneous trapping and sensing) is also provided, based on both experimental and theoretical evidences.

Abstract
This work presents a novel multimodal database comprising 3D face, 2D face, thermal face, visible iris, finger and hand veins, voice and anthropometrics. This dataset will constitute a valuable resource to the field with its number and variety of biometric traits. Acquired in the context of the EU PROTECT project, the dataset allows several combinations of biometric traits and envisages applications such as border control. Based upon the results of the unimodal data, a fusion scheme was applied to ascertain the recognition potential of combining these biometric traits in a multimodal approach. Due to the variability on the discriminative power of the traits, a leave the n-best out fusion technique was applied to obtain different recognition results. © 2018 Gesellschaft fuer Informatik.

Abstract
The segmentation and characterization of the lung lobes are important tasks for Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems related to pulmonary disease. The detection of the fissures that divide the lung lobes is non-trivial when using classical methods that rely on anatomical information like the localization of the airways and vessels. This work presents a fully automatic and supervised approach to the problem of the segmentation of the five pulmonary lobes from a chest Computer Tomography (CT) scan using a Fully RegularizedV-Net (FRV- Net), a 3D Fully Convolutional Neural Network trained end-to- end. Our network was trained and tested in a custom dataset that we make publicly available. It can correctly separate the lobes even in cases when the fissure is not well delineated, achieving 0.93 in per-lobe Dice Coefficient and 0.85 in the inter-lobar Dice Coefficient in the test set. Both quantitative and qualitative results show that the proposed method can learn to produce correct lobe segmentations even when trained on a reduced dataset. © 2018 IEEE.