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Prof. Sébastien Marcel

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Senior Research Scientist

Professional Summary

Prof Sébastien Marcel (IEEE Fellow and IAPR Fellow) is a senior research scientist at the Idiap Research Institute (Switzerland), he heads the Biometrics Security and Privacy group and conducts research on face recognition, speaker recognition, vein recognition, attack detection (presentation attacks, morphing attacks, deepfakes) and template protection. He is also Professor at the University de Lausanne (UNIL) at the School of Criminal Justice. He is also the Director of the Swiss Center for Biometrics at Idiap, which conducts certifications of biometric products. He was Associate Editor and Guest Editor of IEEE journals (TBIOM, SPL, TIFS and SPM). He is also the lead Editor of the Springer Handbook of Biometrics Anti-Spoofing (Editions 1, 2 and 3). Since June 2025 he is a member of the Idiap Direction ad interim.

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Education

PhD Signal Processing and Telecommunications

1997-01-01
2000-12-31

Université de Rennes I

M.A.S. Artificial Intelligence

1995-01-01
1996-12-31

Université Paul Sabatier

M.Sc. Computer Science

1994-01-01
1995-12-31

Université de Limoges

Interests

AI Digital Security Computer Vision Biometrics Security Privacy Face recognition Speaker recognition Vein recognition Presentation attack detection Morphing attack detection Deepfake detection Template protection

📚 My Research

My research focuses on biometrics security and privacy, with particular emphasis on face, speaker, and vein recognition, as well as the robustness of biometric systems against presentation attacks, morphing attacks, deepfakes, and template inversion. At Idiap, I lead the Biometrics Security and Privacy group, where we develop trustworthy methods for recognition, attack detection, fairness evaluation, and privacy protection, combining machine learning, statistical pattern recognition, and rigorous experimental benchmarking. Our work spans both fundamental questions and practical applications, with the goal of making biometric technologies more secure, reliable, and responsible in real-world deployment.

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Featured Publications

Hatef Otroshi Shahreza, Prof. Sébastien Marcel (2026). Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Face Recognition. ICASSP.

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Ünsal Öztürk, Hatef Otroshi Shahreza, Prof. Sébastien Marcel (2026). Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Face Recognition. Foundation and Generative Models in Biometrics @ CVPR.

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