Multi-Modal Biometrics for Surveillance and Digital Evidence Processing in Smart Cities

Dear Colleagues,

Smart cities have rapidly expanded, and their evolution has fueled the need for efficient surveillance systems that ensure safety at the cost of privacy. Biometrics are being integrated into city planning to authenticate identity, manage access, and collect digital evidence. However, biometric systems, being unimodal in nature, suffer from accuracy, spoofing, and environmental factors. Multi-modal biometrics, which apply two or more biometric modalities such as facial recognition, gait analysis, voice recognition, iris scanning, and fingerprinting, offer a solution by enhancing security, reliability, and usability. This Special Issue is centered on the integration of multi-modal biometric systems and privacy-constrained surveillance in the context of their usage in secure, ethical, and efficient control of digital evidence within intelligent urban environments.

This Special Issue targets compiling high-level, original papers and review studies reporting the latest issues, emerging architectures, new trends, and experimental uses of privacy-aware biometric processing in intelligent cities. We solicit submissions that include theoretical work, system deployments, algorithmic progress, regulatory implications, and industrial and academic case studies.

Topics of Interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Federated learning and edge AI for secure biometric recognition;
• Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies for digital evidence validation;
• Deep learning approaches for multi-modal biometric fusion and analysis;
• Anonymization and reversible obfuscation methods in surveillance data;
• Explainable and trustworthy biometric AI systems;
• Design and development of multi-modal biometric systems for smart city environments;
• Privacy-preserving techniques in biometric data acquisition and storage;
• Adversarial attacks and anti-spoofing measures in biometric systems;
• Biometric data lifecycle management in urban surveillance ecosystems;
• Real-time biometric data processing and analytics for public safety;
• Integration of biometric systems with existing smart city infrastructure;
• Ethical and legal frameworks for biometric surveillance;
• Smart city use cases involving biometric access control and digital forensics;
• Lightweight biometric solutions for IoT and edge devices;
• Cross-spectral and cross-modality biometric matching.

This Special Issue will strive to be a valuable platform for researchers, developers, and policymakers to exchange information and promote the development of secure, privacy-protecting biometric systems for future smart cities. We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Bilal Hassan
Dr. Preeti Patel
Prof. Dr. Karim Ouazzane
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• smart cities
• biometric recognition
• biometric processing
• digital evidence