Abstract. In this paper we describe the acquisition and content of a new large, realistic and challenging multi-modal database intended for training and testing multi-modal verification systems. The BANCA database was captured in four European languages in two modalities (face and voice). For recording, both high and low quality microphones and cameras were used. The subjects were recorded in three different scenarios, controlled, degraded and adverse over a period of three months. In total 208 people were captured, half men and half women. In this paper we also describe a protocol for evaluating verification algorithms on the database. The database will be made available to the research community through http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Research/VSSP/banca.

The purpose of Face localization is to determine the coordinates of a face in a given image. It is a fundamental research area in computer vision because it serves, as a necessary first step, any face processing systems, such as automatic face recognition, face tracking or expression analysis. Most of these techniques assume, in general, that the face region has been perfectly localized. Therefore, their performances depend widely on the accuracy of the face localization process. The purpose of this paper is to mainly show that the error made during the localization process may have different impacts which depend on the final application. We first show the influence of localization errors on the specific task of face verification and then empirically demonstrate the problems of current localization performance measures when applied to this task. In order to properly evaluate the performance of a face localization algorithm, we then propose to embed the final application (here face verification) into the performance measuring process. Using two benchmark databases, BANCA and XM2VTS, we proceed by showing empirically that our proposed method to evaluate localization algorithms better matches the final verification performance.

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In this paper we present a text independent on-line writer identification system based on Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs). This system has been developed in the context of research on Smart Meeting Rooms. The GMMs in our system are trained using two sets of features extracted from a text line. The first feature set is similar to feature sets used in signature verification systems before. It consists of information gathered for each recorded point of the handwriting, while the second feature set contains features extracted from each stroke. While both feature sets perform very favorably, the stroke-based feature set outperforms the point-based feature set in our experiments. We achieve a writer identification rate of 100% for writer sets with up to 100 writers. Increasing the number of writers to 200, the identification rate decreases to 94.75%.