All Biometrics Group News

Biowatch SA raises CHF 1.2M seed round to finalise its disruptive wearable biometric authentication solution
by Marcel — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

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.

Idiap is alongside American giants with a tool that allows the "photoshopping" of voices
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

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.

Biometrics: for better or for worse?
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

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?

Can science solve an 80-year-old Indian mystery?
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

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
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:03 PM

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".

The first Reproducible Research Survey in Face Recognition
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

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”.

The BEAT platform goes Open Source
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

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.

Biometrics will make payments more secure
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

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.

New patent on vein anti-spoofing (PAD)
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

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 Idiap Research Institute is part of an EU project (TeSLA) to authenticate student identity online throughout the e-assessment process
by admin — last modified Oct 17, 2017 11:23 AM

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.

License agreement signed between Idiap & EC’s Joint Research Center to experiment BEAT platform.
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

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).

How do we create standards ISO ? Answers at Idiap Research Institute in Martigny Switzerland
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

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.

The Idiap Research Institute makes available metadata and transcriptions for the mobile biometric database MOBIO
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

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 fight against identity theft
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:05 PM

A new research project will provide authentication and secure access to banking and other services over broadband and mobile networks by using biometric identifiers.

New version of biometric tools for face and speaker recognition released
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

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.

Idiap Biometrics group participated to a Google ATAP research sprint
by admin — last modified Mar 16, 2017 05:04 PM

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.