Introduction to the Special Section on Biometric Systems and Applications

Nowadays, biometrics is an important technological area receiving continuously growing interest from academia, industry, government, and the general public, due to the criticality and the social impact of its applications. Biometric systems are in fact rapidly being adopted in a wide variety of applications such as security, ambient intelligence, electronic and physical access control, digital rights management, background checking and defense, medical diagnosis as well as for adaptive environments.