Biometrics – using physical and/or behavioural characteristics for human recognition – is now a well established discipline supporting many practical applications and much on-going research internationally, and has adopted a range of human traits for this purpose, including face, iris, fingerprint, palmprint, voice, handwriting, and so on. In recent years, however, stimulated by hardware advances and a rapidly growing consumer market, especially around increasingly powerful mobile phones and other information platforms, mobile biometrics has become an important trend for biometric applications. It is predicted that the global market for mobile biometrics will grow substantially in the coming years.

Mobile biometrics aim to achieve conventional functionality and robustness while also supporting portability and mobility, bringing greater convenience and opportunity for deployment in a wide range of operational environments from consumer applications to law enforcement and many others. However, achieving these aims brings new challenges, such as issues about power consumption, algorithm complexity, device memory limitations, frequent changes in operational environment, security, durability, reliability, connectivity, and so on.

This Special Issue aims to bring together high quality examples of the best new research which is addressing the challenges of mobile biometrics. It will provide a platform both for academic researchers and industry partners to present their latest new work, stimulate discussion on existing and emerging challenges in mobile biometrics, and propose and evaluate feasible solutions which will advance research in the area. The Special Issue will provide a timely opportunity to produce a survey of the state of the art in this important area which will inform and guide future research.

Submissions should be clearly of direct relevance to mobile biometrics, but we welcome contributions on any aspect of the subject. Topics of interest will include, but are not limited to:
* New trends in mobile biometrics
* Novel traits for human recognition in mobile devices
* Use of accelerometers, gyroscopes, GPS, etc.)
* Reducing algorithmic complexity
* Security and privacy issues
* Divergence between traditional and mobile implementations
* Spoofing and liveness detection
* Soft biometric trait extraction
* Database search and indexing
* Hardware development
* Addressing limitations of size, time and power consumption
* Multi-modality
* Interoperability across mobile platforms
* Mobile biometrics and cloud computing
* Mobile biometrics and Big Data

All submissions are subject to the journal’s peer-review procedures. The authors should follow the journal’s Author Guide at http://digital-library.theiet.org/journals/author-guide and indicate clearly that the paper is submitted to the Special Issue on Mobile Biometrics. All submissions will be screened by the Guest Editors to ensure an appropriate match to the theme of the Special Issue, but submissions not meeting this criterion can still be considered for inclusion in a future regular issue of the Journal.

Guest editors:
Guodong Guo, West Virginia University, USA
Harry Wechsler, George Mason University, USA
Shiguang Shan, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Norman Poh, University of Surrey, UK