Sangeeta has spent the last two years with us here in STRaDe doing research on retinal image processing and has become not only our colleague but also a friend. After this time her stay here finally came to an end and Sangeeta is flying back home, to Bangladesh. She might be leaving permanently, but if everything goes well Sangeeta will return to us once again next year in spring. In the meantime we wish her all the best while we now must get accustomed to her absence from our lab where she had been a constant presence.
South Moravian high school students interested in learning more about the STRaDe research group and biometry visited us as a part of the T-exkurze – a field trip project organised by the JCMM . Martin Drahanský introduced them to the topic of biometry in his informative lecture after which we welcomed the students in our biometric lab. There we gave them the opportunity to explore some of the techniques and technologies used in biometry but also to experience them firsthand. We hope that they liked it here and that in future some of them might decide to join us.
Assoc. Prof. Waleed Abdulla of University of Auckland visited our STRaDe research group as a part of a sabbatical leave. Here he attended to the mathematical apparatus of selected disertation topics. Consultations and discussions between us will likely result in more than a single publication. Assoc. Prof. Abdulla specialises in human biometry, signal and speech processing, hyperspectral imaging applications and more.
Martin Sakin and Jan Tinka spent a week at a biometry summer school organized by professor Massimo Tistarelli in Alghero in Sardinia, where they attended lectures and took part in discussions on topics ranging from person recognition based on iris to recognition based on gait patterns. The main topic of this year’s summer school was not only biometry but also application of deep learning methods and other machine learning for biometric purposes. Martin and Jan therefore returned from the school endowed with new knowledge, which will be helpful for their dissertation and research.
Biometrics includes many interesting topics. We focus mainly, but not only, at fingerprints. Other topics we deal with belong the iris and retina recognition and recognition based on 3D scans of face or hand. A big part of our research is focused at liveness detection and sensor quality analysis.
Biomedical applications are very closely related to the biometric systems. The biggest emphasis in STRaDe is put on detection and recognition of skin diseases on fingers and retina diseases. These areas are important for us, since they are part of biometric technologies we are dealing currently with.
Robotics has not been our main focus. However, we needed a platform to present and proove functionality of our computer vision algorithms and we applied for a robotic grant then, hence we accepted very challenging task to create our own platform, which would be useful for rescue teams of all sorts. Result of this is our robotic unit RUDA.
Computer vision is very tightly related to biometric systems, since you need to acquire an image from a camera system to get biometric features in most cases. Even the basic principles of data processing are very similar to algorithms and techniques of the computer vision.
Our research of the liveness detection aims at biometric technologies based on the fingerprints, finger or hand veins, face and eye. In this field we registered a few patents and utility models.
Research of the eye diseases recognition is aimed at recognition of symptoms of various eye diseases in an image of iris and retina, where are the symptoms to be recognised best.
In 2008 we started dealing with issues of influence of various finger skin diseases on the fingerprint recognition process. To improve our knowledge and to base it on reliable information, especially from the medical point of view, we made fingerprint skin diseases our common cause with the dermatologists from St. Anne's University Hospital Brno, University Hospital Olomouc and a private dermatological clinic in Darmstadt (Germany).
Research and creation of fingerprint spoofs for testing liveness detectors and used fingerprint sensors.
New methods of specific damage of synthetic fingerprints and their usage.
Within our research activities we cooperate with many academic partners. In the following list there are some of them: