The Unconstrained Ear Recognition Challenge 2023 (UERC) Call for Papers

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The Unconstrained Ear Recognition Challenge 2023 (UERC)

Held in conjunction with IEEE IJCB 2023
https://ijcb2023.ieee-biometrics.org/

Important dates: Registration is open now
UERC 2023 Website: http://awe.fri.uni-lj.si/uerc.html
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*** Motivation ***
Ear recognition is an active area of research within the biometric
community. However, the work in this ?eld has long focused on
maximizing raw recognition performance, while other aspects critical
for the deployment of biometrics recognition techniques in practice
have largely been ignored. One such example is demographic
bias. Modern ear recognition approaches are not only expected to be
highly efficient when recognizing individuals, but also to be equally
fair in their decisions, regardless of the demographic characteristics
of the subjects, e.g., gender or ethnicity. The 2023 Unconstrained Ear
Recognition Challenge will, therefore, investigate the performance as
well as demographic bias of existing ear recognition solutions and
promote research into bias-mitigation mechanisms that have minimal
impact on the recognition performance.

Understanding demographic bias is important because it can help to
identify and mitigate inaccuracies and errors in biometric systems,
prevent the development of discriminatory systems, and even inform the
public policies and regulations related to biometric systems. Research
related to demographic bias in ear recognition techniques can help
promote the development of more accurate, fair, and just ear
recognition systems that are less likely to produce errors or false
positives for certain groups of people and protect individual's rights
and interests.

To promote research in the bias-aware ear recognition, the
Unconstrained Ear Recognition Challenge (UERC) 2023 will bring
together researchers working in the field of ear recognition and
benchmark existing and new algorithms on a common dataset and under a
predefined experimental protocol.


*** Execution ***
UERC 2023 will be organized as a two-track competition, where each
track will be focused on one specific goal. Participants will be free
to enter only a single track or compete in both. For each track, a
dataset, evaluation tool written in Python, and baseline models in
Python will be made available. A detailed description of the two
tracks is given below:

Track 1: Fair Ear Recognition. The first UERC 2023 evaluation track
will collect ear recognition models and score their performance on ear
images captured in unconstrained environments. Here, the performance
indicators will include both, a measure of recognition performance as
well as an estimate of the exhibited demographic bias. Both
recognition and bias scores will contribute to the overall
ranking. Participants will be free to develop any type of model to
maximize performance, while minimizing bias. The final submission for
this track will include a working solution (source code or compiled
binary), which the organizers will run to evaluate the performance on
a sequestered test data.

Track 2: Bias Mitigation. The second UERC 2023 track will address bias
mitigation strategies explicitly. Here, a baseline ResNet model
(written in Python) will be made available to the participants and the
goal will be to design bias mitigation schemes that reduce the initial
bias of the models without adversely affecting performance. Such
schemes may include additional model blocks and network components,
normalization layers, knowledge infusion mechanisms, score
normalization procedures, image preprocessing approaches and any other
solution capable of reducing bias of the predefined base
model. Similarly to the first track, participants will have to submit
a working solution that the organizers will evaluate on the
sequestered test data.


*** Summary paper and co-authorship ***
The results of UERC 2023 will be published in the IJCB conference
paper authored jointly by all participants of the challenge.


*** Organizers ***
+ Asst. Prof. Žiga Emeršic, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of
Computer and Information Science, Slovenia

+ Prof. Hazim Kemal Ekenel, Istanbul Technical University, Department
of Computer Engineering, Turkey

+ Prof. Guillermo Camara-Chavez, Federal University of Ouro Preto,
Brazil

+ Prof. Peter Peer, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Computer and
Information Science, Slovenia

+ Prof. Vitomir Štruc, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of
Electrical Engineering, Slovenia, EU

*** Timeline ***
+ February 14th: Promotion of the competition, website draft, registration opens.
+ February 15th: Kick-off of the competition: 
        data, toolkit and instructions made available on UERC  website.
+ April 15th: Possible interim ranking.
+ May 1st: Registration closes, end of the competition.
+ May 15th: Summary paper submission.