Fernando Alonso-Fernandez

Professor, PhD

School of Information Technology

Halmstad University, Sweden

External Collaborator

Computer Graphics and Vision and AI Group

University of the Balearic Islands, Spain

BIOMETRICS & SECURITY - Image Analysis - Machine Learning - Computer Vision - Artificial Intelligence

See an overview (ppt) of our research here

Google Scholar h-index = 43, appr. 6k+ citations (May 2025)

Scopus h-index = 34, appr. 3.4k+ citations (May 2025)

Short Bio

Fernando Alonso-Fernandez received the MSc/PhD degrees in telecommunications from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain (2003/2008). Since 2010, he has been with the School of Information Technology (Halmstad University, Sweden) first with a Marie Curie IEF and a Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the Swedish Research Council (both grants obtained simultaneously), and later as recipient of a Project Research Grant for Junior Researchers of the Swedish Research Council. Since 2017, he has been an Associate Professor at Halmstad University (permanent position) and became Professor in 2025. Since 2019, he has been an External Collaborator at the University of the Balearic Islands, Spain.

He has been involved in multiple EU (such as FP6 Biosecure NoE and COST IC1106, Horizon PopEye) and national projects (such as SIDUS-AIR, CAISR, AI.m. 2.0, MIDAS, Diffuse) focused on security and analysis of signals for biometric purposes. He has consistently attracted funding grants as PI on biometrics research from the prestigious and very competitive Swedish Research Council in 2010, 2013, 2017 and 2022 (only one active grant is allowed as PI on a specific research topic, and he has always obtained a new grant in the subsequent call after the previous one ended). He also contributes to teaching on different aspects of Biometrics and Computer Vision at all levels (Bsc, MSc, PhD), and regularly serves as examiner of MSc and PhD theses, both nationally and abroad.

He has co-authored over 150 international contributions at refereed conferences and journals and several book chapters. He co-chaired ICB2016, the 9th IAPR International Conference on Biometrics. In addition, he is Associate Editor of IEEE T-IFS, of the IEEE Biometrics Council Newsletter, and an elected member of the IEEE IFS-TC of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He also contributes as a regular reviewer and organising committee member in top venues such as IEEE TIP, TIFS, TBIOM, Image Vis Comput, Pattern Recognition, Information Fusion journals, or ICPR, ICIP, EUSIPCO, IJCB, ISBA conferences.

He is a member of the IEEE, IAPR, and the national contact point for the European Association for Biometrics (EAB). He is also involved in other roles at the EAB, such as co-chairing the EAB-RPC (the annual Research Projects Conference, currently the largest event on research funded by the EU in Biometrics and Identity Management) or being jury member of the of the annual EAB Biometrics Awards (granted to the best PhD theses in Europe on biometrics research).

Research Interests

Main Research Areas

Biometrics (especially, but not restricted to, face, iris, periocular and fingerprint analysis)
Soft-biometrics, Emotion and Behaviour
Mobile Biometrics
Forensic Analysis
Privacy and Security

Fundamental Research Areas

Artificial Intelligence
Signal and Image Processing
Computer Vision
Feature Extraction
Machine Learning
Pattern Recognition

Profiles

My YouTube channel mostly contains personal stuff gathered from here and there (mainly music and airplane videos), but from time to time, I upload some videos of my lectures or paper presentations

Highlights

Chair of Round Table on Generative AI and synthetic data for Biometrics (2024)

At the EAB-RPC 2024, the Annual Research Projects Conference of the European Association of Biometrics

Project (Halmstad PI) from Horizon Europe (2024-2027)

3.2M€ for the 3 years PopEye project to investigate biometrics on-the-move technologies for border control

Research on the impact of social media filters on face biometrics (2022)

Published in a PRL paper, with the database also available. Research presented in two invited talks, here and here.

Project (PI) from the Swedish Innovation Agency (2022-2025)

2.6MSEK for 3 years on AI-Powered Crime Scene Analysis to investigate indoor scene mapping with nanodrones

Jury Member (Awards of the European Association for Biometrics, EAB) since 2020

Granted annually to the best PhD theses in Europe in the field of biometrics (picture shows the 2020 ceremony)

Organizing Committee (EAB-RPC, Annual Research Projects Conference of the European Association of Biometrics) since 2018

The largest event on research funded by the EU in the area of Biometrics and Identity Management (picture shows the 2022 edition)

Project (PI) from the Swedish Research Council (2022-2024)

3.6MSEK for 4 years on Facial Analysis in the Era of Biometric Masks

Distinguished Lecturers Program (DLP) of the IEEE Biometrics Council (2022-2024)

Prof. Josef Bigun distinguished lecturer, to support education activities for the biometrics community

IT-Forensics student nominated to Tech Girl of the Year 2022

Student Nadia Benamer, who studies IT forensics and information security at Halmstad University

Best Master’s Thesis Award 2021 of the Swedish AI Society (drone detection)

To co-supervised student Fredrik Svanström (unique prize for all nominations in Sweden)

Associate Editor (2018-) of IEEE Biometrics Council Newsletter

Published quarterly by the IEEE Biometrics Council

External Collaborator of the University of the Balearic Islands

Started research and educational collaboration on identity and emotion analysis (picture with Prof. F.J. Perales and Chancellor L. Huguet, 2019)

Stakeholder Board member (2021-2023) of the EU project CC-DRIVER

EU project on cyber criminality. Acting on behalf of the European Association for Biometrics

Expert in Research Study on “Technology Foresight on Biometrics for the Future of Travel” (2021)

Organized by FRONTEX, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency

Contributor to Position Paper “Facilitating Free Travel in the Schengen Area” (2021)

Published by the European Association of Biometrics (EAB)

Associate Editor (2021-) of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (Biometrics EDICS)

Published by the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Impact Factor: 7.178. Top (first) journal publication in Computer Security & Cryptography

Associate Editor (2020-2022) of Pattern Recognition Letters

Published by Elsevier. Impact Factor: 3.756. Top-10 of publications in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

Collaboration with FacePhi Biometria in Spain, specialized in face technology for mobile devices (2019-2020)

In the framework of the Swedish Vinnova Staff Exchange program in Artificial Intelligence

National Contact Point of Sweden (Ambassador)

European Association for Biometrics

General Co-Chair (ICB-2016, the 9th IAPR International Conference on Biometrics)

The premier conference of the field (>100 participants, the picture shows the closing ceremony)

Increased security with facial recognition

Feature article at Halmstad University website about our research

Plenary Talk (Human Authentication Using Facial Cues)

At the Artificial Intelligence International Conference, A2IC 2018

Networks