Electrical & Computer Engineering Electrical and Computer Engineering

The College of Engineering at Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University

Marios Savvides

Associate Research Professor – ECE ;  Director – CyLab Biometrics Center
Department Electrical and Computer Engineering
Office B209 Hamerschlag Hall
Telephone (412)-268-1142
Fax (412)-268-6345
Email
Website http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~msavvid/
Assistant Kelley Conley

Research Interests

Biometric Identification

My research is focused on how to recognize a person based on their biometrics, e.g. their face, iris, fingerprint or palm print. These biometrics offer characteristics unique to each individual. Most of the security systems rely on passwords, swipe cards, and RF ID tags to recognize and grant access to users. However these can easily be lost or stolen, which can lead to intruders gaining access to secure physical and virtual spaces. These problems are overcome if one uses biometrics as a method to authenticate a user's identity. Biometric recognition has many challenges as the appearance of the biometrics can vary at the time of acquisition, e.g. in face recognition, a person's face can appear different due to variations in lighting, change in pose and expression. My research is focused on developing robust algorithms that can handle these type of intra-class variations with different biometric modalities. I am also researching reducing the complexity of these algorithms so that they can be implemented on small form-factor devices such as PDAs and cell-phones.

More details about research.

In the News

  • Savvides Talks Facial Recognition Software on CNN
  • Faculty, Staff, Students Celebrate Semester's End at ECE Day
  • Keeping an Eye on the Bad Guy
  • Li Wins Best Student Paper Award
  • Savvides invited to speak at Biometrics Task Force Identity Management Conference
  • A Look Inside New Security Research
  • Savvides Tapped to Join New Center Under Director of National Intelligence
  • Four ECE Faculty Win College Awards
  • Carnegie Mellon Researchers to Collaborate With National Biometric Security Project
  • ECE Faculty Teach High School Workshops
  • ECE Faculty Instruct Information Assurance Capacity Building Program

    • External Press

  • Lines on the face help pick out the twin who dunnit
  • Savvides Talks Facial Recognition Software on CNN
  • Manhunt—Boston Bombers
  • “Hallucinating” a face, new software could have ID’d Boston bomber
  • Are Faces the New Fingerprints?
  • A Face in the Crowd: Say goodbye to anonymity
  • FBI launches $1 billion face recognition project
  • Savvides develops facial, iris recognition
  • Security on the (Eye)Ball: Hands-Free Iris Biometrics to Keep Bad Guys at Bay
  • CMU Developing Terrorist-Fighting Tool
  • Correlation pattern recognition for biometrics
  • Airport security becomes high-tech

    • Marios Savvides

    Research Area

    Device Science and Nanofabrication

    Keywords

    Biometric identification, pattern recognition, computer and robot vision, image understanding, image and signal processing

    Education

    PhD, 2005
    Electrical and Computer Engineering
    Carnegie Mellon University

    MS, 2000
    Robotics
    Carnegie Mellon University

    BEng, 1997
    Microelectronics Systems Engineering
    University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology