Ear recognition is an active area of research within the biometric community. While work in this field has long focused on constrained, laboratory like-setting, recent approaches are looking increasingly at data acquired in unconstrained conditions and many techniques and approaches have been presented recently focusing on data captured in these so called “in-the-wild” settings. To promote research in these “in-the-wild” settings the Unconstrained Ear Recognition Challenge (UERC) 2019 will bring together researchers working in the field of ear recognition and benchmark existing algorithms on a common dataset and under a predefined experimental protocol. UERC 2019 will build on the previous challenge, UERC 2017 (available on IEEE Xplore and on arXiv.org), organized in the scope of the 2017 International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB) and use the same dataset and protocol, thus enabling to examine and directly compare the progress made in the field since 2017.
The results of the challenge will be published in a summary paper authored jointly by all participants of the challenge.
Over the last two decades, progress in imaging technologies has yielded unprecedented details on the mechanisms of cardiovascular system function. Nowadays, the complex nature and the fast dynamics at the basis of fundamental electrophysiological processes can be imaged with high spatial and temporal resolution, in a versatile and minimally invasive manner. Innovative optical approaches to simultaneously probe and control the two main parameters regulating excitable cells (membrane potential and intracellular Ca2+) have recently been employed to the investigation of cardiac physiology at different hierarchical levels, spanning from single isolated cardiomyocytes to intact heart. The development of these novel optical-based methodologies represents a whole new approach for the investigation of excitable cells, and has provided fundamental insights into cardiovascular diseases, driving the identification of novel pathologic mechanisms and therapeutic strategies.
In this Special Issue, we welcome researchers to submit original research and review articles on optical methods applied to further our understanding of cardiac physiology and pathophysiology.