Automatic and reliable authentication of individuals is becoming an essential part of the modern world, for security and convenience in our life, in our work andin society.Biometrics-basedsystems utilize physiologicalorbehavioralch- acteristics of an individual including the face, iris, ?ngerprint, palmprint, hand, voice, signature, or a combination of them, for this task. We are now seeing increasing interest and practical deployment of biometric systems. TheInternationalWorkshoponBiometricRecognitionSystems(IWBRS2005) was held in conjunction with ICCV 2005, providing an interactive forum for leading biometrics researchersand system designers.A biometric authentication competition (BAC) was conducted by the workshopto track the state-of-the-art biometrics technologies. This volume of workshop proceedings includes 32 papers carefully selected from a total of 130 submissions. The papers address the problems in face, iris, ?ngerprint, palmprint, speech, writing and other biometrics, and contribute new ideastoresearchanddevelopmentofreliableandpracticalsolutionsforbiometric authentication. We would like to express our gratitude to all the contributors, reviewers, and ProgramCommittee and OrganizingCommittee members who made this a very successful workshop. We also wish to acknowledge the Institute of Automation, ChineseAcademyofSciences,andSpringerforsponsoringthisworkshop.Special thanks are due to Miao Hong, Xin Yang, Zhuoshi Wei, Yinghao Cai, Zhaofeng He, Cheng Zhong, Shiqi Yu and Xianchao Qiu for their hard work in workshop organization. We hope you could bene t from the fruitful workshop to improve the perf- mance of your biometric systems.
