https://www.journals.elsevier.com/pattern-recognition-letters/call-for-papers/mobile-and-wearable-biometrics-vsimwb

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are nowadays daily employed by more than 3 billion people, with an expected further worldwide penetration up to 5 billion users by 2025. Among the reasons for such astonishing growth, from the early years of mobile communications to the present day, there is the fact that modern mobile devices offer the possibility to perform many tasks and access several services, such as taking pictures or perform on-line payments, with an extreme ease of use. As a matter of fact, the share of internet users making mobile online payments is above 30% in most regions of the world.

As the next step in terms of technological revolution, wearable devices such as smart glasses, chestbands, and wristbands, are also rapidly becoming widespread. Thanks to their ability in capturing physiological signals like those related to the heart rate, a vast number of applications is being developed for wearable platforms, ranging from activity tracker and healthcare to social sharing in the context of the Internet of Things.

It has yet to be observed that most of the services which can be performed through mobile and wearable devices are typically accessed and used by providing sensitive and valuable data, such as passwords, credit card numbers, and so forth. Furthermore, the information commonly captured by the sensors with which these devices are equipped, and stored within them, is highly personal, with consequent possible security and privacy issues in case unauthorized subjects try to access such content.

It is therefore of paramount importance to design effective and secure mechanisms to access these devices. In this regard, resorting to biometric recognition systems seems a natural choice. Mobile and wearable devices are in fact commonly equipped with several sensors which could be exploited to acquire discriminative traits, thus allowing to recognize the authorized users.

Furthermore, the possibility of performing biometric recognition within mobile and wearable devices may come in handy to use them as authenticating tokens, providing the means to perform decentralized access control, thus exploiting mobile and wearable technology as authenticating means by combining their capabilities with biometric solutions. Such approach would for instance allow to design reliable systems performing continuous recognition, monitoring the identity of a subject during a period of indefinite temporal extension, hence providing robustness against session hi-jacking, in which an intruder may seize control of an ongoing session after a successful login of a legitimate user.

It is yet worth remarking that the systems to be implemented for such devices should be designed while taking into account the specific peculiarities of the considered scenarios. For instance, with respect to solutions dedicated to desktop systems, where physical characteristics are commonly preferred, approaches based on either behavioural or cognitive traits might be more appropriate when dealing with mobile and wearable devices. The computational complexity of the required processing may also represent a concern for systems with limited resources available.

The present special issue therefore seeks for recent and innovative developments in pattern recognition fields with applications to the design of biometric recognition systems for mobile and wearable devices. Topics of interest include, for example, the analysis and processing of the discriminative information (biosignals, images) which can be captured through mobile and wearable devices, the design of hardware architectures or software packages which could be effectively implemented in such environments, the proposal of machine learning approaches requiring limited computational resources, among others.

The topics of the Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

Mobile biometrics in the wild;
Continuous biometric recognition using wearable devices;
Sensors for wearable technology (smartwatches, smart eyewear, smart t-shirt, etc.);
Physical and behavioral in the mobile environment;
Cognitive biometrics for wearable devices;
Age and aging effects in mobile biometrics;
Machine learning with limited computational resources;
Biometric template protection: challenges and solutions in the mobile environment;
Usability, interfaces, and human factors;
Hardware architectures and software for biometric recognition on mobile and wearable devices;
Affective computing in biometric recognition.

Important dates

Submission period: September 1-20, 2021
First review notification: November 7, 2021
Revision submission: December 19, 2021
Second review notification: January 23, 2022
Final submission: March 6, 2022
Final notice of acceptance/rejection: April 10, 2022

Guest Editors

Ph.D. Emanuele Maiorana, Roma Tre University, Italy
Ph.D. Ruggero Donida Labati, University of Milan, Italy
Prof. Shiqi Yu, Southern University of Science and Technology, China