Fernando Alonso-Fernandez

Full 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 - Deep Learning - Computer Vision - Artificial Intelligence

See an overview (ppt) of our research here

Google Scholar h-index = 45, appr. 6.6k+ citations (April 2026)

Scopus h-index = 35, appr. 3.9k+ citations (April 2026)

Biography

Education and Early Research Career (Madrid)

Fernando Alonso-Fernandez received the MSc/PhD degrees in Telecommunications Engineering from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain (2003/2008), with his PhD studies supported by a competitive FPI scholarship from the Regional Government of Madrid. He specialised in Communications and Audiovisual Systems during his MSc studies, with a thesis titled “Aircraft Recognition Using Video Sequences”, and later pursued the PhD program in Communication Systems and Technologies, focusing on computer vision, image processing, and biometrics in his dissertation “Biometric Sample Quality and its Application to Multimodal Authentication Systems”. His PhD thesis received the Doctor Europeus mention, the Doctorate Extraordinary Award from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (2011) and the COIT-BANESTO Award to the Best PhD Thesis on Information and Communication Technologies applied to Banking (2010).

He subsequently held a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation at Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. During his doctoral and postdoctoral periods in Madrid, he was a member of the ATVS Biometrics Research Lab (today Bida Lab), one of Spain’s leading research groups in biometrics and pattern recognition, and participated in several large-scale Spanish and EU projects on biometrics, multimodal authentication, and security, such as the EU FP6 BioSecure Network of Excellence on biometrics, the EU FP6 BioSec Integrated Project (BioSec IP), the EU COST-275 Action, the EU FP7 BBfor2 Initial Training Network (ITN) on biometrics and forensics, and the Spanish BiosecurID and BIO-PASS projects.

Academic Career at Halmstad University

Since 2010, he has been with the School of Information Technology at Halmstad University, Sweden. His initial postdoctoral period was supported by a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (IEF) of the EU and a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Swedish Research Council (VR), both obtained simultaneously, making him the first and only researcher to date at Halmstad University to receive a Marie Curie Fellowship. He later received a VR Grant for Junior Researchers in 2013, followed by consecutive VR Project Research Grants as Principal Investigator in 2017 and 2022.

During this period, he has established an internationally recognised research profile in biometrics and computer vision. His research has also achieved top rankings in several international biometric technology benchmarks and competitions across areas such as periocular recognition, iris recognition, signature verification, multimodal recognition, and deepfake generation. Since 2017, he has been an Associate Professor at Halmstad University (permanent position) and became Full Professor in 2025. Since 2019, he has also been an External Collaborator with the Computer Graphics and Vision and AI Group at the University of the Balearic Islands, Spain.

During his years at Halmstad University, he has participated in several major Swedish and EU research initiatives, such as the SIDUS-AIR project on human interaction with autonomous systems funded by the Swedish Knowledge Foundation (KKS), the EU COST Action IC1106 on Biometrics and Forensics, the EU Horizon 2020 REMIND project on smart environments and assistive technologies, the MAISTR project on AI-driven data analytics and service innovation (KKS), and the CAISR research profile on Applied Intelligent Systems (KKS).

Research Projects and Competitive Funding

Throughout his career, he has led and participated in more than 50 research projects and private contracts funded by Swedish (VR, Vinnova, KK Foundation), Spanish, and EU agencies and institutions, mainly focused on biometrics, security, AI, and signal and image analysis. Recent relevant roles include Scientific Coordinator of the EU Horizon Europe project PopEye (2024–27) and Principal Investigator of the Vinnova project AI-Powered Crime Scene Analysis (2022–25), selected among 5 out of 71 proposals nationwide.

He has also consistently attracted funding grants as PI on biometrics research from the prestigious and very competitive Swedish Research Council (VR) in 2010, 2013, 2017 and 2022, as mentioned above, maintaining continuous support from the Swedish Research Council (VR) since he arrived to Sweden over more than a decade through consecutive grants (only one active VR 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).

International Exchanges and Collaborations

Fernando Alonso-Fernandez has a strong network built through diverse research activities, including joint publications, guest visits, invited talks, conference organisation, and editorial boards and committees, among others.

Internationally, he collaborates with leading researchers in biometrics, computer vision, and pattern recognition, having resulted in joint publications in top-tier journals such as ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE Computer, Information Fusion, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, Pattern Recognition or IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence. Key collaborators and co-authors in recent and previous research activities include Prof. Julian Fierrez (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain), Prof. Christoph Busch (NTNU, Norway), Prof. Arun Ross (Michigan State University, USA), Prof. Josef Kittler (University of Surrey, UK), Prof. Fabio Roli (University of Genova and Cagliari, Italy), Prof. Raymond Veldhuis (University of Twente, Netherlands), Prof. Naser Damer (TU Darmstadt, Germany), and Prof. Vitomir Štruc (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia), all internationally recognised experts in biometrics and related fields.

Across the years, he has conducted more than 20 international research visits and exchange assignments at universities, research centres, companies, and agencies across Europe, including the University of Kent (UK), University of Twente (Netherlands), University of Cagliari (Italy), Telecom SudParis (France), University of Malta, NTNU/Gjøvik University (Norway), FacePhi Biometrics (Spain), I+ Srl (Italy), and recurring visiting appointments at the University of the Balearic Islands (Spain).

Scientific Publications and Editorial Activities

He has co-authored over 150 international contributions in refereed journals and conferences as well as several book chapters. He served as General Co-Chair of ICB-2016, the 9th IAPR International Conference on Biometrics held in Halmstad (+100 participants, premier conference of the field), and has since held several international leadership roles at conferences such as Area Chair of ICPR and ICB, Tutorial Chair of BTAS, Keynote/Tutorial Chair of WIFS, Publication Chair of IWBF, Special Session/Workshop co-organizer of WIFS and WACV, and Doctoral Consortium Co-Chair of ICB. In addition, he is Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (IEEE T-IFS, top 1 journal in Computer Security & Cryptography, Impact Factor 8) and of the IEEE Biometrics Council Newsletter, and he is an elected member of the IEEE Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IFS-TC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

He also serves as a regular reviewer, area chair, and organising committee member for leading venues such as IEEE TIP, TIFS, TBIOM, Pattern Recognition, Information Fusion, and Image and Vision Computing journals, major conferences in Biometrics and Security (ICB, BTAS, IJCB, BIOSIG, ISBA, WIFS) and major conferences in fundamental areas such as Computer Vision (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV), Image Processing (ICIP), Pattern Recognition (ICPR, CIARP), and Signal Processing (ICASSP, EUSIPCO).

Scientific Leadership and Professional Service

He is a member of the IEEE, IAPR, EurAI, and the national contact point in Sweden for the European Association for Biometrics (EAB). He is also involved in other roles at the EAB, such as co-chair of the EAB-RPC (the annual Research Projects Conference, currently the largest event on research funded by the EU in Biometrics and Identity Management) and jury member of the annual EAB Biometrics Awards (granted to the best PhD theses in Europe on biometrics research). He has also contributed as an expert, moderator and panellist to international initiatives and agencies, including EUROPOL, FRONTEX, and the European Association for Biometrics (EAB). He is also co-founder of the Swedish Biometrics Forum and of the Digital Forensics Competence Center (DFCC), a national Swedish network involving academia, industry, and law-enforcement agencies in digital forensics and biometrics.

Teaching, Supervision, and Mentoring

He also contributes extensively to teaching on different aspects of Biometrics, Computer Vision, AI and Pattern Recognition at all levels (Bsc, MSc, PhD), including course coordination, development of new courses and laboratory activities, supervision and mentoring of students and researchers, and hosting of visiting faculty and researchers from international institutions. He regularly serves as examiner, opponent and external reviewer of MSc and PhD theses, both nationally and abroad, and has supervised and co-supervised PhD students, postdoctoral, junior researchers, and numerous award-winning BSc and MSc degree projects in collaboration with academia and industry. Relevant examples include the Swedish AI Society Best Master’s Thesis Award in 2021 (one unique prize for all nominations in Sweden), the nomination for Tech Girl of the Year in 2022 by Microsoft Sweden, and several Best Degree Project Awards at Halmstad University and from Swedish industrial foundations.

Research Interests

Main Research Areas

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

Other Research Areas

Multimodal Data Fusion
Deepfake and Synthetic Data Analysis
Autonomous and Intelligent Systems
Explainable AI

Fundamental Research Areas

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

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

Collaborator AI Research Institute (IAIB) of University of the Balearic Islands

Picture shows 2026 visit as invited researcher

Council of Wisdom on Iris Recognition

Moderator and Panelist, organized by EAB, the European Association of Biometrics (2026-01-28)

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