TITLE 1: The Magic Passport

AUTHOR: Matteo Ferrara, Annalisa Franco

YEAR: 2014

DESCRIPTION:

Once upon a time there was a criminal; he was reading his e-mail when a banner
caught his attention: low cost flights for the destination of his dreams. He had
already started to book the trip when suddenly realized that, being wanted by the
police, he could not use his passport without being arrested. What to do? He could
not miss that opportunity, so he called a good friend and they started to think for a
possible solution. Do you want to know if they succeeded? Read the rest of the
paper and find it out.

TITLE 2: Biometric Passports: Policy for International and Domestic Deployment

AUTHOR: G. Matthew Ezovski

YEAR: 2005

DESCRIPTION:

Advancements in technology have created the possibility of greater assurance of

proper travel document ownership, but some concerns regarding security and
effectiveness remain unaddressed. Through the International Civil Aviation
Organization, the world has adopted standards whereby passports can store
biometric identifiers. The United States has required that all member countries of
the Visa Waiver Program must begin issuing biometric passports by October 2006
in order to continue to experience the benefits of the program in the U.S. Experts
have addressed substantial technical challenges in the areas of data storage and
biometric efficacy, but additional political and technical challenges remain. Interest
groups must be assured through technical and political means that data stored will
be safe, and the State Department must continue to investigate technical means of
achieving secure data storage and transfer. Basic access control and the Faraday
cage hold the greatest promise in terms of insuring data security, but the negative
effects of basic access control on transmission speed and accuracy must be
addressed. Other participating countries should work quickly to issue biometric
passports, but the U.S. government should also be prepared to extend deadlines to
allow for effective implementation. The biometric passports discussion is a
precursor to other debates to come, including standardized technologies for U.S.
drivers licenses and the collection of biometric data by government entities.
Lessons learned in this debate, both technical and political, should be applied in the
development and implementation of forthcoming technology.

TITLE 3: On the Effects of Image Alterations on Face Recognition

Accuracy

AUTHOR: Matteo Ferrara

YEAR: 2016

DESCRIPTION:

Face recognition in controlled environments is nowadays considered rather

reliable, and if face is acquired in proper conditions, a good accuracy level can be
achieved by state-of-the-art systems. However, we show that, even under these
desirable conditions, some intentional or unintentional face image alterations can
significantly affect the recognition performance. In particular, in scenarios where
the user template is created from printed photographs rather than from images
acquired live during enrollment (e.g., identity documents ), digital image
alterations can severely affect the recognition results. In this chapter, we analyze
both the effects of such alterations on face recognition algorithms and the human
capabilities to deal with altered images.

TITLE 4: On Mixing Fingerprints

AUTHOR: Asem Othman and Arun Ross

YEAR: 2013

DESCRIPTION:

This work explores the possibility of mixing two different fingerprints, pertaining
to two different fingers, at the image level in order to generate a new fingerprint.
To mix two fingerprints, each fingerprint pattern is decomposed into two different
components, viz., the continuous and spiral components. After prealigning the
components of each fingerprint, the continuous component of one fingerprint is
combined with the spiral component of the other fingerprint. Experiments on the
West Virginia University (WVU) and FVC2002 datasets show that mixing
fingerprints has several benefits: (a) it can be used to generate virtual identities
from two different fingers; (b) it can be used to obscure the information present in
an individuals fingerprint image prior to storing it in a central database; and (c) it
can be used to generate a cancelable fingerprint template, i.e., the template can be
reset if the mixed fingerprint is compromised.

TITLE 5: A Fast and Accurate Palmprint Recognition System Based on Minutiae

AUTHOR: Raffaele Cappelli, Matteo Ferrara, and Dario Maio

YEAR: 2012
DESCRIPTION:

Palmprint recognition is a challenging problem, mainly due to low quality of the

pattern, large nonlinear distortion between different impressions of the same palm
and large image size, which makes feature extraction and matching
computationally demanding. This paper introduces a high-resolution palmprint
recognition system based on minutiae. The proposed system follows the typical
sequence of steps used in fingerprint recognition, but each step has been
specifically designed and optimized to process large palmprint images with a good
tradeoff between accuracy and speed. A sequence of robust feature extraction steps
allows to reliably detect minutiae; moreover, the matching algorithm is very
efficient and robust to skin distortion, being based on a local matching strategy and
an efficient and compact representation of the minutiae. Experimental results show
that the proposed system compares very favorably with the state of the art.