Soft biometrics are human characteristics providing categorical information about people such as age, beard, gender, glasses, ethnicity, eye/hair color, length of arms and legs, height, weight, skin/hair color, gait and gestures, accent, etc. In contrast to "hard" biometrics, which includes face, fingerprint, retina, iris, voice etc., and are generally unique and permanent personal characteristics, soft biometrics provide some vague physical or behavioral information which is not necessarily permanent or distinctive. Such soft biometric traits are usually easier to capture from a distance and do not require cooperation from the subjects. Whilst they cannot provide robust authentication, they can be used for improving the verification performance of biometric recognition systems. Other applications of soft biometrics include human-machine interaction, content based image/video retrieval, person re-identification, etc. Research on soft biometrics is still in its infancy despite the vast potential applications. This one-day workshop will bring together researchers working not only on soft biometrics but also on related disciplines to present and discuss the recent developments in the field. The event aims also at encouraging exchanges, interactions and potential collaboration between the potential participants. The workshop will hopefully open a debate on new opportunities and new challenges in the area, and at unifying the efforts toward the development of adequate tools, protocols and databases for evaluating and monitoring the progress in the field of soft biometrics. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first workshop devoted to the emerging topic of soft biometrics.

Topics

The topics of interest for this workshop include, but are not limited to:

◦Methods for estimating/extracting soft biometric traits including age, beard, gender, glasses, ethnicity, eye/hair color, length of arms and legs, height, weight, skin/hair color, gait and gestures, accent, scars, tattoos, kinship, etc.
◦Novel soft biometric traits
◦Image and video based soft biometrics
◦Soft biometrics in human-machine interaction
◦Kinship verification from face and body images
◦Extracting soft biometrics from range data
◦Extraction of soft biometric attributes from low quality surveillance videos
◦Image/video retrieval using soft biometrics
◦Person re-identification using soft biometrics
◦Improving person authentication using soft biometrics
◦Studying the reliability of soft biometric traits
◦Soft biometrics in forensic applications
◦Soft biometric systems
◦Databases and tools for evaluating soft biometric systems
◦Extracting soft biometrics from forensic scenarios
◦Combination of soft biometrics with other forensic evidence
◦Ethical and societal implications of using soft biometrics