** CALL FOR PAPERS **

Image and Vision Computing (IVC) Special Issue on Biometrics in the Wild

** Introduction **
Biometric recognition from data captured in unconstrained settings, commonly referred to as biometric recognition in the wild, represents a challenging and highly active area of research. The interest in this area is fueled by the numerous application domains that deal with unconstrained data acquisition conditions such as forensics, surveillance, social media, consumer electronics or border control. While the existing biometric technology has matured to a point, where excellent performance can be achieved for various tasks in ideal laboratory-like settings, many problems related to in-the-wild scenarios still require further research and novel ideas. The goal of this special issue is to present the most advanced work related to biometric recognition in unconstrained settings and introduce novel solutions to open biometrics-related problems. Submitted papers should make a significant contribution in terms of theoretical findings or empirical observations, demonstrate improvements over the existing state-of-the-art and use the most challenging datasets available.

The special issue builds on the Biometrics-in-the-Wild (BWild) workshop series organized as part of IEEE FG 2015 and IEEE FG 2017. The special issue is open to all, but submissions from past BWild participants are especially welcome.

** Topics of Interest **
We invite high-quality papers on topics related to biometric recognition in the wild, including, but not limited to:
• Region of interest detection (alignment, landmarking) in the wild,
• Soft biometrics in the wild,
• Context-aware techniques for biometric detection and recognition,
• Novel normalization techniques,
• Multi-modal biometrics in the wild,
• Biometric recognition in the wild,
• Biometrics from facial behavior (e.g., eye movement, facial expressions, micro-expressions),
• Biometrics based on facial dynamics,
• Novel databases and performance benchmarks,
• Ethical issues, privacy protection and de-identification,
• Spoofing and countermeasures,
• Deep learning approaches for unconstrained biometric recognition,
• Related applications, especially mobile.

** Important Dates **
Submission deadline: 15 September, 2017
Notifications to authors: 31 February, 2018
Target publication date: April, 2018

** Guest Editors **
Bir Bhanu, University of California, Riverside, United States
Abdenour Hadid, University of Oulu, Finland
Qiang Ji, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States
Mark Nixon, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Vitomir Štruc, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia

** Advisory Editors **
Rama Chellappa, University of Maryland, United States
Josef Kittler, University of Surrey, United Kingdom