Mario Saviddes
Research Professor; Director – CyLab Biometrics Center
My research is focused on how to recognize a person based on their biometrics, e.g. their face, iris, fingerprint or palm print.
These biometrics offer characteristics unique to each individual. Most of the security systems rely on passwords, swipe cards, and RF ID tags to recognize and grant access to users. However these can easily be lost or stolen, which can lead to intruders gaining access to secure physical and virtual spaces. These problems are overcome if one uses biometrics as a method to authenticate a user's identity. Biometric recognition has many challenges as the appearance of the biometrics can vary at the time of acquisition, e.g. in face recognition, a person's face can appear different due to variations in lighting, change in pose and expression. My research is focused on developing robust algorithms that can handle these type of intra-class variations with different biometric modalities. I am also researching reducing the complexity of these algorithms so that they can be implemented on small form-factor devices such as PDAs and cell-phones.
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