Identification of persons through biometric data has emerged as a convenient solution for secured access to restricted data as well as physical or virtual areas. Despite its clear advantages over password or token-based security, the strong inherent link of biometric data to its owner raises new social concerns on privacy and personal data vulnerability. Moreover, and contrarily to passwords and tokens, the intraclass variability of the biometric sample challenges researchers to find robust methods for extracting, processing, coding, transmitting, or storing this piece of personal information. There exist a plethora of biometric systems deployed around the world, most of them requiring collaborative procedures by the user for biometric data acquisition. Recently, the proliferation of surveillance devices has directed the research interest for unobtrusive or unperceived identification systems, denoted as remote biometrics or biometrics at a distance. Also, the advances on audiovisual biometric recognition allow automatic indexing and retrieval in multimedia streams, without any collaboration of the person being targeted. All these scenarios increase both the concerns on security and handling of these personal data. In this way, there remain several avenues of research to be pursued whose outcome will enable biometric methods, collaborative or not, more widespread and rapid acceptance of this technology.

The goal of this special issue is to bring together research work on techniques that aim for a more effective deployment of biometric systems, ranging from security access (high user cooperation) to seamless tracking of identities (null collaboration). We seek submissions presenting novel research and field experiments on topics which include:

Challenges on privacy, authenticity, and integrity of biometric data:
Biometric template encryption, error correcting and coding approaches, cancelable biometrics, biometric cryptosystems
Biometric attacks, aliveness detection
Biometric data hiding: watermarking and steganography
Identity theft, identity management
Smart cards, Biometric ID-cards
Match-on-chip, match-on-device
Biometric tracing, RFID
Ethical and legal issues
Challenges on biometric data handling:
Quality measures, multimodality
Aging effects, updating of templates
Remote biometrics, behavioral analysis
Interoperability, standardization, and usability
Biometrics through internet
Before submission authors should carefully read over the journal's Author Guidelines, which are located at http://www.hindawi.com/journals/is/guidelines.html. Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the journal Manuscript Tracking System at http://mts.hindawi.com/ according to the following timetable:

Manuscript Due March 1, 2010
First Round of Reviews June 1, 2010
Publication Date September 1, 2010
Lead Guest Editor

José L. Alba-Castro, Department of Signal Theory and Communications, University of Vigo, 36310 Vigo, Spain
Guest Editors

Bülent Sankur, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bogazici University, Bebek, 34342 Istanbul, Turkey
Patrizio Campisi, Department of Applied Electronics, University of Roma Tre, 00146 Rome, Italy
Bernadette Dorizzi, Department of Electronics and Physics, Institut TELECOM, TELECOM & Management SudParis, 9 rue Charles Fourier, 91011 Evry, France
Claus Vielhauer, Department of Informatics and Media, Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences, Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany