Biometrics is an automated method of recognizing a person based on her physiological or behavioral characteristics, and is potentially a powerful and reliable method for personal identification. Biometrics is a multidisciplinary research area of different subjects e.g. signal processing, pattern recognition, computer vision, biology, and statistics. Due to their highly secure and trustworthy characteristics, biometrics technologies are becoming the foundation of an extensive array of highly secure identification and personal verification solutions. In our daily life, we observe many applications of biometrics around us e.g. border control, driver license, time management and attendance, authentication at security gate, and surveillance etc.

The significance of biometrics is also underscored by the rapidly growing academic and research activities devoted to this field, and by a large number of annually organized events by different institutions. However, the key challenge to the research community is to propose and develop integrated solutions that deal with the entire gamut of research problems from sensors and data acquisition, to biometric data analysis, systems design and real applications.

This proposed special issue is aimed at collecting original papers that address any aspect of design, implementation & application of biometrics systems. Original contributions that provide novel solutions & applications to challenging problems in biometrics systems will be solicited.

Research areas of relevance to this special issue would therefore include, but not only limited to:

• Emerging biometrics modalities e.g. ear, gait, teeth recognition
• Novel techniques in 2D and 3D biometrics feature extraction and recognition
• Secure biometrics communication and transmission
• Privacy, anonymity and security in biometrics systems
• Biometrics encryption, liveness detection, and cancelable biometrics
• Integration and interoperability in biometrics systems
• Large-scale biometrics databases and indexing
• Reliability, availability and dependability of biometrics systems and applications
• Biometrics systems for security applications (e.g., authentication, surveillance, computer security, national defense, border control, driver license, transportation)
• Biometrics systems for secure applications (e.g., e-commerce, e-banking, PKI)


Important Dates:

Submission of Manuscripts : 15 June, 2009
Decision Notification : 30 September, 2009
Submission of Camera ready paper : 15 December, 2009


Submission Process:

Papers are solicited for the special issue, guidelines for preparation of the manuscripts, are provided at the Telecommunication Systems journal website, http://www.springer.com/business/business+information+systems/journal/11235
The manuscripts have to be submitted in the form of a PDF file to: mkhurram@ksu.edu.sa and khurram.khan@scientist.com. All papers will be rigorously reviewed based on originality, high scientific quality, organization & relevance to this special issue.

Guest Editor:

Dr. Muhammad Khurram Khan
Center of Excellence in Information Assurance (CoEIA), King Saud University,
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Email: mkhurram@ksu.edu.sa & khurram.khan@scientist.com