Motivations

Nowadays, there is a strong interest by governments, organizations, and companies across the world on adopting and using forensic tools and biometric technologies to face identification, frauds, civil crimes, fake news, and terrorism.
Although biometrics and forensics deal with different aspects of security, they both support law enforcement and investigation and both follow the constant evolution of the methodologies and technologies. Moreover, new scenarios arise where techniques designed for biometrics can be utilized for forensic purposes, or vice-versa. Furthermore, the recent impact of deep learning techniques in major pattern recognition application areas, including biometrics and forensics, gives to this field new challenges, including security issues.

The aim of this special issue is to gather innovative contributions in the field of security, forensics, and biometrics which include many key sectors like Forensics Analysis, Watermarking & Data Hiding, Steganography, Surveillance, Biometrics and Soft Biometrics, Biometric analysis of crime scene traces, etc.


Topics

The topics of the Special Issue include, but are not limited to:
● Anonymity & Privacy
● Applied Cryptography
● Biometrics and Soft Biometrics
● Audiovisual biometrics for multimedia forensics
● Forensic behavioral biometrics
● Biometric analysis of crime scene traces
● Communication & Physical-Layer Security
● Forensics Analysis
● Adversarial machine learning
● Deep learning
● Hardware Security
● Information-Theoretic Security
● Multimedia Content Hash
● Security of Large Networked Systems
● Steganography
● Surveillance
● Usability & Human Factors
● Watermarking & Data Hiding
● Covert Communication & Side-Channel Attacks

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission period: June 1-30, 2020
First review notification: August 15, 2020
Revision submission: September 30, 2020
Second review notification: October 31, 2020
Final submission: December 1, 2020
Final notice of acceptance/rejection: December 30, 2020

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Paper submissions must conform to the Pattern Recognition Letters format guidelines
Manuscripts can have no more than 7 pages (plus one page after revision) and must be submitted to the online submission system. When submitting their papers through the online system, authors must select the acronym ”VSI:BIOFOR” as the article type.
Submissions to the special issue must include new, unpublished, original research. Papers must be original and have not been published or submitted elsewhere.
If the submissions are extended works of previously published papers, the original works should be included and a description of the changes that have been made should be provided.
The submission should include at least 30% new contribution of high relevance. The title and the figures of the submitted paper should be different, and the common part of the conference paper and of the extended version cannot be verbatim the same.
Guest editors will make an initial determination of the suitability and scope of all submissions.

CONTACTS

For inquiries regarding the special issue, send an email to the managing guest editor at:
francesco.marra@unina.it

GUEST EDITORS

Ph.D. Diego Gragnaniello, University Federico II of Naples, Italy
Prof. Chang-Tsun Li, Deakin University, Australia
Ph.D. Francesco Marra, University Federico II of Naples, Italy
Prof. Daniel Riccio, University Federico II of Naples, Italy