Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects (DARPA has awarded three contracts to the nonprofit research group SRI International. Within the framework of these projects, SRI International will work closely with the Biometrics Security & Privacy group of the Idiap Research Institute.
Biometrics Security and Privacy
Biometrics refers to the automatic recognition of individuals based on their physiological and/or behavioral characteristics.
The Biometrics Security and Privacy (BSP) group at Idiap focuses on three main areas of research:
- Biometric recognition: We investigate and develop new biometrics based recognition algorithms, notably for face, voice, and vein biometric modalities.
- Presentation attack detection: We look for new and better ways of detecting presentation attacks on face, voice, and vein biometric recognition systems.
- Biometric template protection: We research effective methods of preserving both the security of biometric recognition systems and the privacy of their users by protecting the biometric models ("templates") that are employed by the system for recognition purposes.
The BSP group prioritizes reproducibility in research. This is important for ensuring that our work can be both verified and built upon by the wider research community. To enable reproducibility, we mainly make use of our Python-based signal-processing and machine-learning toolbox, Bob, which we make freely available for academic purposes. The group also develops and maintains the BEAT platform -- a MLaaS platform compliant with Swiss and European data-security norms.
The group participates in several large-scale biometrics projects at Swiss (SNSF), European (H2020) or world-wide levels (eg. IARPA/DARPA) but also conducts projects directly with companies.
The BSP group provides also expertise to the Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing, which, among other things, carries out tests and evaluations on commercial products related to biometrics.
Video Presentation
Current Group Members

MARCEL, Sébastien
(Senior Researcher)
- website

HEUSCH, Guillaume
(Research Associate)
- website

KORSHUNOV, Pavel
(Research Associate)
- website

BHATTACHARJEE, Sushil (Kumar)
(Research Associate)
- website

GEISSBUHLER, David
(Research Associate)
- website

HALSTEAD, Michael (Allan)
(Postdoctoral Researcher)
- website

KOTWAL, Ketan
(Postdoctoral Researcher)
- website

SARFJOO, Saeed (Seyyed)
(Postdoctoral Researcher)
- website

KRIVOKUCA, Vedrana
(Postdoctoral Researcher)
- website

GEORGE, Anjith
(Postdoctoral Researcher)
- website

NIKISINS, Olegs
(Postdoctoral Researcher)
- website

MOHAMMADI, Amir
(Research Assistant)
- website

DE FREITAS PEREIRA, Tiago
(Research Assistant)
- website

MOSTAANI, Zohreh
(Trainee)
- website
Alumni
- ATANASOAEI, Constantin-Cosmin
- BALA SUBBURAMAN, Venkatesh
- BENDALE, Abhijit
- CHINGOVSKA, Ivana
- EGLITIS, Teodors
- EL KHOURY, Elie
- EL SHAFEY, Laurent
- ERDOGMUS, Nesli
- GALBALLY, Javier
- GÜNTHER, Manuel
- JOHANSSON, Niklas
- JUST, Agnès
- KEOMANY, Jean
- MÄÄTTÄ, Jukka
- MANDASARI, Miranti
- MCCOOL, Christopher
- MCLAREN, Mitchell
- MEHTA, Rakesh
- RABELLO DOS ANJOS, André
- ROY, Anindya
- SANCHEZ RIERA, Jordi
- TOME, Pedro
- VANONI, Matthias
- WALLACE, Roy (Geoffrey)
Current Projects
- ALLIES - Autonomous Lifelong learnIng intelLigent Systems
- BATL - Biometric Authentification with Timeless Learner
- ODESSA - Online Diarization Enhanced by recent Speaker identification and Sequential learning Approaches
- SAVI - Spotting Audio-Visual Inconsistencies
- SWAN - Secure Access Control over Wide Area Network
- TESLA - An Adaptive Trust-based e-assesment System for Learning
Recent Projects
- HFACE - Heterogeneous Face Recognition
- 3DFINGERVEIN - 3D FingerVein Biometrics
- FARGO - Convenient and Secure 3D Face Recognition based on RGB-D Cameras
- CSSB - Centre Suisse en Sécurité Biométrique
- BIOWAVE - BIOWAVE pre-product, a BIOmetric Watch Activated by VEins
- BBC_BOB - Adapting bespoke speaker identification models to be used in IDIAP's 'Bob.Spear' speaker recognition software
- GOOGLE_MOBILE - Mobile Face and Voice Anti Spoofing
- BEAT - Biometrics Evaluation and Testing
- COHFACE - COntactless Heartbeat detection for trustworthy FACE Biometrics
- EMMA1 - Expression Mimics Marker Analysis
- ATAP - ATAP - Continuous Authentication Program
- FEDARS - Feature Extraction from Deep learning Architectures for face Recognition Systems
- LOBI - Low Complexity Binary Features for Robust-to-Noise Speaker Recognition
- TABULARASA - Trusted Biometrics under Spoofing Attacks
- BBFOR2 - Bayesian Biometrics for Forensics
- CONTEXT - Context-based modelling for object detection
- REPLAY - Face Authentication Robust to Replay Attacks
- MOBIO - Mobile Biometry
Developped by the start-up Global ID, Idiap and HES-SO Valais, a new biometric identification system will soon be available at a good price. This technology should be especially interesting for emerging countries.
Bon marché, ce nouveau système d’identification biométrique a été conçu pour les pays émergents par la start-up Global ID, l’Idiap et la HES-SO Valais.
Ce lundi 6 février 2018, AMS, leader mondial sur le marché des solutions de capteurs ultra-performants a annoncé [1] avoir acquis pour un montant non divulgué KeyLemon, une spin-off de l'Idiap.
On Monday Feb 6th, ams, a worldwide supplier of high performance sensor solutions, announced the acquisition of KeyLemon for an undisclosed amount [1].
For many years the Idiap research institute has worked on reproducible research and developed several tools for this such as Bob or the BEAT platform.
Dr Sébastien Marcel, one of the Idiap senior researcher and head of the Biometrics Security & Privacy group, has been elevated by IEEE to IEEE Senior Member.
The Idiap Research Institute published a paper in the International Conference on Machine Learning on a new Open-Science Web Platform.
The Idiap Research Institute has signed a new research agreement with BBC to evaluate the speaker recognition technology developed by the biometrics security & privacy group.
Matthias Vanoni, fondateur de la startup Biowatch, a participé et gagné ICC'2014 International Create Challenge.
Matthias Vanoni, founder of Biowatch, participant and winner of the ICC'2014 International Create Challenge.
The biometrics group at Idiap develops methods to detect biometric hackers.
Now EPFL's Security and Cryptography Laboratory and the startup Global ID have developed an even more secure identification system that processes data more safely than current standards and that leverages 3D vein imaging technology developed by the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny, the University of Applied Sciences in Sion (HES-SO Valais-Wallis) and Global ID.
Idiap created in collaboration with UniDistance a new Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS) program. The goal of this program is to teach concepts and technologies in the area of Biometrics and Privacy and to provide students with a full understanding of data protection, privacy preservation, compliance with privacy regulations and potential privacy losses.
L’institut de recherche Idiap de Martigny et son Centre suisse de recherche et d’évaluation en sécurité biométrique ont intégré deux programmes phares du gouvernement américain. Odin et MediFor ont pour mission de lutter contre le "spoofing" et de démasquer la propagande. Les explications de Sébastien Marcel, directeur du centre, interrogé par Anne Baecher.
Nouvelle étape pour l’Idiap de Martigny: l’institut vient d’intégrer deux projets phare du gouvernement américain dédié à la sécurité biométrique, il fait partie d’un groupe de quatre équipes qui travailleront sur ODIN….un système contre ce qu’on appelle le spoofing.
The first Edition of the Handbook of Biometric Anti-Spoofing (Trusted Biometrics under Spoofing Attacks) published in 2014 ( DOI 10.1007/978-1-4471-6524-8 ) was a tremendous success with more than ten thousand chapter downloads.
Idiap Research Institute releases Bob a Python-based signal-processing and machine learning toolbox.
Lausanne, Switzerland, January 17, 2017 - Biowatch SA, a Swiss start-up, has successfully closed last December an oversubscribed first financing round at CHF 1.2 million to accelerate the development of its solution on biometric authentication for wearables. This seed round is following a CHF 800k grant from the CTI in last February and a CHF 100k loan from the FIT last June. It was led by serial entrepreneur and business angel Patrick Delarive with participation from the Venture Capital fund Polytech Ecosystem Ventures and SICPA Finance. Further investments from various business angels completed the investment.
Sébastien Marcel head of the biometrics group at Idiap speaking at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD)
The Idiap Research Institute seeks qualified candidates for Two PostDoc position in the field of face presentation attack detection (aka anti-spoofing). The research will be conducted in the framework of an International project.
To speak Chinese without having to learn it or to being able to speak for yourself: these dreams may become reality thanks to the progress of speech synthesis. American informatics giants are working on it, with Adobe and its project VoCo. But they are not the only ones: the Idiap Research Institute of Martigny also specializes in this domain.
It is supposedly one of the most promising solutions for protecting us from terrorist attacks. Biometrics allows identifying a person by their biological characteristics like finger prints, the iris or the face. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, technological solutions have known a fast progress: facial recognition software, “cerebral fingerprinting”, automatic control systems for moving crowds…But can we really trust biometrics with our security? And above all, what happens if these data fall into the wrong hands?
Sébastien Marcel is an unlikely judge of beauty queens, but his face recognition expertise could finally solve the identity of an Indian woman on a precious Swiss watch.
Ivana Chingovska received the PhD degree from EPFL on May 2nd 2016 after the public defense of her doctoral dissertation entitled: "Trustworthy Biometric Verification under Spoofing Attacks: Application to the Face Mode".
For many years, the Idiap Research Institute has actively participated in numerous national and international research projects in the field of biometric cybersecurity and received total funding amounts of several tens of millions of Swiss francs.
Idiap published a book chapter entitled “Face Recognition in Challenging Environments: An Experimental and Reproducible Research Survey” appearing in the Springer book “Face Recognition Across the Imaging Spectrum”.
After 4 years of development, the BEAT platform is now available for download as an open-source project, under the Affero GNU GPL version 3.
Voice identification, facial recognition, fingerprint reading or heartbeat analysis: biometric identification methods will be used more and more this year on mobile phones and online payment platforms at the expense of the usual password.
Idiap published on Feb 18 2016 a PCT patent on biometric vein anti-spoofing (also called presentation attack detection) under the reference WO/2016/023582.
The project TeSLA, led by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), with a length of three years and a budget of seven million euros, involves universities, quality assurance agencies, research centres and technology companies from twelve countries. In total, there will be a team of around eighty professionals and eighteen months of largescale pilot tests with the participation of over 14,000 students from Europe.
CSEM at Neuchâtel and the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny are joining forces to propel the young and promising Swiss startup BIOWATCH to the top
The BEAT platform is an European computing e-infrastructure for Open Science proposing a solution for open access, scientific information sharing and re-use including data and source code while protecting privacy and confidentiality. It allows easy online access to experimentation and testing in computational science. The platform also provides an attestation mechanism for your reports (scientific papers, technical documents or certifications).
The Swiss Centre for Biometrics Research and Testing and the Biometric group at Idiap Research Institute organize the Speaker Anti-spoofing competition.
It is a Swiss premiere. The Idiap Research Institute in Martigny receives this week delegates from all around the world that have the task of creating the famous ISO standards. They will discuss about the standards in the domain of biometrics. The Idiap researcher Sébastien Marcel explains the procedure and the stakes of this scientific meeting.
Sébastien Marcel, head of the Swiss Center for Biometrics Research and Testing at Idiap talks about Standards in Biometrics on local media rts.ch
The Idiap Research Institute invites applications for one post-doctoral position in biometrics. The position is funded by a new 18-month research project on 3D finger-vein sensing and recognition. The research will be carried out together with a Swiss consortium of one high-profile research institute and one company.
Jan 19 2016 afternoon
The MOBIO database consists of bi-modal (audio and video) data taken from 152 people. The database has a female-male ratio or nearly 1:2 (100 males and 52 females) and was collected from August 2008 until July 2010 in six different sites from five different countries. This led to a diverse bi-modal database with both native and non-native English speakers.
The BEAT platform is an European computing e-infrastructure for Open Science proposing a solution for open access, scientific information sharing and re-use including data and source code while protecting privacy and confidentiality.
Idiap Biometrics group was awarded the 2015 IET Biometrics Premium Best Paper Award for the paper:
A new research project will provide authentication and secure access to banking and other services over broadband and mobile networks by using biometric identifiers.
SC 37 Biometrics January 2016
Good bye Laurent
It’s time for change !
Each year the IET awards a prize to the authors of the best paper published within the last two years in each of the IET’s journals.
The Multispectral-Spoof face spoofing database is a spoofing attack database build at Idiap Research institute. It contains images of real accesses recorded in VIS and NIR spectra as well as VIS and NIR spoofing attacks to VIS and NIR systems.
AVspoof is intended to provide stable, non-biased spoofing attacks for researchers to test both their ASV systems and anti-spoofing algorithms.
The Biometric group at Idiap Research Institute is releasing its new version of biometric tools for face and speaker recognition, including a number of state-of-the-art preprocessing, feature extraction, machine learning algorithms, evaluation metrics and database protocols.
The Biometrics group was chosen by Google to participate to a confidential on-invitation-only research sprint on mobile biometrics along with more than 20 experts from 16 institutions worldwide. The group was able to carry out biometrics research on a 40 Tb dataset from 1500 data subjects.
The Idiap Research Institute and Haute Ecole Spécialisée de Suisse Occidentale, Switzerland, just released the VERA palm-vein and VERA spoofing palm-vein databases.
On 02 October 2014, the submitted paper by L. El Shafey, E. Khoury, and S. Marcel : "Audio-visual gender recognition in uncontrolled environment using variability modeling techniques" was awarded IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition) Best Biometrics Student Paper Award at the International Joint Conference on Biometrics 2014 (IJCB, 2014 29 September - 2 October 2014 at Clearwater, Florida, USA).
On 10 September 2014 the jury of the 8th European Biometrics Research and Industry Award has selected the three laureates of the 2014 edition of this prestigious competition.
At Switzerland's Idiap Research Institute, one man is on the front lines of the fight against cyberterrorism. He's an expert in biometrics. The more individual the biometric, the more difficult it is to attack.
Vein recognition is a biometric that has traditionally been seen as difficult to hack or spoof, as the biometric patterns created by the vein structure in a person’s finger are hidden from view.
L’iPhone 5S possède un lecteur à empreintes digitales qui permettra de sécuriser l’accès au téléphone. Si cette technique est déjà présente dans d’autres objets, il s’agit du premier produit de consommation de masse à intégrer la biométrie. Mais quelle est la partie du corps qui se prête le mieux à la reconnaissance d’une personne dans la vie quotidienne?
The TABULA RASA project is organizing a Spoofing Challenge and is inviting researchers to develop ingenious attack plans and to deceive various biometric authentications systems of different modalities that will be demonstrated at the 6th International Conference of Biometrics (ICB 2013 ). The most brilliant attempt, which will be decided on its spoofing success and originality, will be awarded with the "Best Spoofing Attack Award", accompanied by an incentive prize.
Idiap announced the start this month of the Biometrics Evaluation and Testing (BEAT) project funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) with the EPFL as a full partner, through the Security and Cryptography Laboratory (LASEC) of Prof. Vaudenay.
We are glad to announce the start this month of the Biometrics Evaluation and Testing (BEAT) project funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) with Sébastien Marcel as the Principal Investigator and Project Coordinator at the Idiap research institute.
The workshop will be held in Martigny at Idiap, Wednesday 14th of December 2011, room 106.