# Biometrics in the Era of COVID-19: Challenges and Opportunities arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09258 ยท HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09258/ ## Key facts - Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). - Builds on 28 of its 170 references that are in the map. - First posted on arXiv 18 Feb 2021. ## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28) - [VoxCeleb: a large-scale speaker identification dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08612/) (2017) - [Do Deep Nets Really Need to be Deep?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6184/) (2013) - [Deep Face Recognition: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06655/) (2018) - [SER-FIQ: Unsupervised Estimation of Face Image Quality Based on Stochastic Embedding Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09373/) (2020) - [Face Image Quality Assessment: A Literature Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01103/) (2020) - [Generative Face Completion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05838/) (2017) - [Masked Face Recognition Dataset and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.09093/) (2020) - [Exploring Automatic Diagnosis of COVID-19 from Crowdsourced Respiratory Sound Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.05919/) (2020) - [Coswara -- A Database of Breathing, Cough, and Voice Sounds for COVID-19 Diagnosis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.10548/) (2020) - [Occlusion Robust Face Recognition Based on Mask Learning with PairwiseDifferential Siamese Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06290/) (2019) - [AI4COVID-19: AI Enabled Preliminary Diagnosis for COVID-19 from Cough Samples via an App](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.01275/) (2020) - [Fairness in Biometrics: a figure of merit to assess biometric verification systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02395/) (2020) - [A survey of face recognition techniques under occlusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11366/) (2020) - [The Effect of Wearing a Mask on Face Recognition Performance: an Exploratory Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13521/) (2020) - [A Survey on Periocular Biometrics Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.03360/) (2018) - [Grid Loss: Detecting Occluded Faces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.00129/) (2016) - [COVID-19 and Computer Audition: An Overview on What Speech & Sound Analysis Could Contribute in the SARS-CoV-2 Corona Crisis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11117/) (2020) - [An Early Study on Intelligent Analysis of Speech under COVID-19: Severity, Sleep Quality, Fatigue, and Anxiety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00096/) (2020) - [The voice of COVID-19: Acoustic correlates of infection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09478/) (2020) - [Does Generative Face Completion Help Face Recognition?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02858/) (2019) - [Probing Fairness of Mobile Ocular Biometrics Methods Across Gender on VISOB 2.0 Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.08898/) (2020) - [The Unconstrained Ear Recognition Challenge 2019 - ArXiv Version With Appendix](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.04143/) (2019) - [Audio, Speech, Language, & Signal Processing for COVID-19: A Comprehensive Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.14445/) (2020) - [Expression Recognition Using the Periocular Region: A Feasibility Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.09798/) (2018) - [Cascaded Generation of High-quality Color Visible Face Images from Thermal Captures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09524/) (2019) - [Enhancing Trust in eAssessment - the TeSLA System Solution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04985/) (2019) - [Attribute-Guided Deep Polarimetric Thermal-to-visible Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11980/) (2019) - [Large-Scale Mixed-Bandwidth Deep Neural Network Acoustic Modeling for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.04887/) (2019) ## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11) - [MFR 2021: Masked Face Recognition Competition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15288/) (2021) - [FocusFace: Multi-task Contrastive Learning for Masked Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14940/) (2021) - [Mask-invariant Face Recognition through Template-level Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05646/) (2021) - [My Eyes Are Up Here: Promoting Focus on Uncovered Regions in Masked Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.00996/) (2021) - [The Effect of Wearing a Face Mask on Face Image Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11283/) (2021) - [OCFR 2022: Competition on Occluded Face Recognition From Synthetically Generated Structure-Aware Occlusions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.02760/) (2022) - [Fun Selfie Filters in Face Recognition: Impact Assessment and Removal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.06022/) (2022) - [Physics-Driven Spectrum-Consistent Federated Learning for Palmprint Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00451/) (2023) - [Recent Advancement in 3D Biometrics using Monocular Camera](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02646/) (2024) - [A Lightweight Transformer with Phase-Only Cross-Attention for Illumination-Invariant Biometric Authentication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.19160/) (2024) - [Image Quality Assessment of Identity Cards Using Measures from Open Face Image Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.11884/) (2026) ## Abstract (arXiv) Since early 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic has had a considerable impact on many aspects of daily life. A range of different measures have been implemented worldwide to reduce the rate of new infections and to manage the pressure on national health services. A primary strategy has been to reduce gatherings and the potential for transmission through the prioritisation of remote working and education. Enhanced hand hygiene and the use of facial masks have decreased the spread of pathogens when gatherings are unavoidable. These particular measures present challenges for reliable biometric recognition, e.g. for facial-, voice- and hand-based biometrics. At the same time, new challenges create new opportunities and research directions, e.g. renewed interest in non-constrained iris or periocular recognition, touch-less fingerprint- and vein-based authentication and the use of biometric characteristics for disease detection. This article presents an overview of the research carried out to address those challenges and emerging opportunities.