We invite competition proposals for the 10th IEEE International Conference on Biometrics: Theory,Applications and Systems (BTAS) to be held on 23-26 September 2019 in Tampa, Florida.

Competitions are a key component of academic events, since their main goal is to benchmark state-of-the art algorithms, to consolidate research and identify open problems. In this respect, if conceived and carried out in a fair and expert way, they can represent effective means for recording the latest progress in specific topics. They represent a challenge to the academic community, so that the competition organizers have the possibility to contribute pushing the state of the art in specific subjects.

We especially encourage competition proposals from emerging fields or new application scenarios relevant to the broader biometric community, and in particular proposals focusing on new emerging fields and open research questions that are able to attract a significant number of participants.

Competition organizers having a strong record in the field are especially welcome. The deadline for submitting competition proposals is February 10, 2019. Decisions will be notified to organizers by February 17, 2019.

Competition Proposal Submission

Competition proposals should be sent via email to the BTAS 2019 competition co-chairs, Oleg Komogortsev (ok@txstate.edu) and Maria De Marsico (demarsico@di.uniroma1.it). Please remember to use the email subject “BTAS 2019 Competition Proposal: [title of the competition]”.

The proposal should include the following information to facilitate the decision process:

• Title of the competition.
• Names, affiliations, contact information, and a brief CV of the competition organizers.
• A list of three most relevant publications related to the competition for each organizer, and a possible outline of previous experience in performance evaluation and/or organizing competitions.

Regarding the organizers' profiles, though not necessarily senior researchers, they should be known in the community (as authors of papers in the field, organizers of past competitions, etc.)

Justification:
• Motivation for the competition, expected outcomes and anticipated impact,
• Relevance to BTAS 2019,
• Description of the novelty of the competition,
or

• Relationship to previous competitions, if any.

The topic of the competition should be either a still unexplored or scarcely explored one, or a one deserving attention due to open problems and real world emerging applications.

Execution:
• Description of the dataset(s) used for the competition and the available annotations,
• Details on the possible subset created for the challenge (training, testing, sequestered data)
• Details on the experimental protocol and result generation/submission procedure,
• Information on the platform used (for data sharing, submission, verification of the results), if any,
• Detailed description of the evaluation criteria and performance metrics, so that results can be replicated later, and possible available baseline implementations/code (e.g., a starter kit).

The dataset used for the competition should be large enough, both in terms of subjects and of samples, to guarantee relevance and generalizability of achieved competition results. The experimental protocol should be robust and clearly defined. Performance evaluation should follow widely accepted criteria and exploit standard metrics. If different metrics are proposed, they must be clearly described and motivated.

Organization:
• Expected minimum number of external participants (separate from the organizers)
• Plan for promoting the competition and attracting participants
• Any potential sponsors (for prize/award money)
• Description of the planned coordination activities
• A detailed timeline for the competition.

Proposals attracting a significant number of participants will assure significance and generalizability of achieved outcomes.

• Information about the future availability of the dataset used for the competition, to allow future comparison.

The organizers should assure the availability of data and evaluation protocols also afer the competition, for future comparison.

• Other information the organizers consider as relevant for the proposal evaluation.

Schedule

Competition organizers can announce their competition and socialize the call for competition as soon as they receive the decision/notification by February 17 2018. The competitions should be completed by the summary paper submission deadline. Competition organizers will also be requested to prepare a web page for the competition, which will be linked from the conference web site. The website should be online before the start of the competition.

Proceedings and Presentation

Competition organizers will be invited to submit a summary paper discussing organization, datasets, and results by June 15 2019. The summary papers will be considered for inclusion in the BTAS 2019 conference program and should follow the same formatting and presentation rules as regular papers.
The presentation format (if accepted) will be determined based on the quality of the submission and reviewer feedback received.
Accepted summary papers will be included in the proceedings of BTAS 2019 and send for inclusion in IEEE Xplore.

Important Dates

• Deadline for submitting proposals: February 10, 2019
• Decisions to organizers: February 17, 2019
• Submission of summary papers: June 15, 2019

For any additional information please contact the BTAS 2019 Competition Co-Chairs:
Oleg Komogortsev (ok@txstate.edu)
Maria De Marsico (demarsico@di.uniroma1.it).

• Competition proposals template can be found at:
• Competition Template