Abstract:
Biometrics enabled technologies are gaining ubiquity in today's security conscious world. We will describe the tasks of verification and identification using fingerprints and face recognition as examples in the context of physical security, civilian applications (e.g., UID project), and unmonitored remote authentication applications as in the case of e-commerce. Transforming raw biometric data into a form that is suitable for responding to queries and browsing, remains a challenging problem. It involves considering the factors governing the choice of modalities, indexing large databases, ensuring privacy of data, mitigating vulnerabilities of identity theft, and inexact matching. Towards this end, we will describe a probabilistic framework for incorporating the fusion of several modalities with spatio-temporal reasoning to boost recognition. It incorporates an innovative paradigm called evolutionary biometrics, which can potentially make unobtrusive surveillance applications viable in unconstrained environments.

Bio:
Dr. Venu Govindaraju is a Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York and a world-renowned expert in pattern recognition and biometrics. He received his B-Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1986, and his Ph.D. from UB in 1992. His research and innovations have had a level of practicality that is virtually unparalleled in academia. His handwriting recognition techniques are scalable across languages, document types and applications; and have been adapted and licensed to the United States Postal Service, the Australia Post and the United Kingdom's Royal Mail. Professor Govindaraju is a Fellow of highly selective, prestigious societies such as ACM and IEEE, and has received numerous international honors, including the 2010 IEEE Technical Achievement Award. His publications record comprises over 300 refereed works, and he has supervised 25 doctoral dissertations. He also has an extraordinary record of funding, and has been an investigator on over $55 million of research funding from federal, state and industry-based sources.