The main objective of the Action was to investigate effective methods for the recognition of people over the Internet, based primarily on voice and facial characteristics in order to facilitate, protect, and promote financial and other services over this growing telecommunication medium. In order to facilitate progress towards achieving individual objectives as well as the overall aims, the activities were divided into four main areas, which corresponded to the four working groups organized by Management Committee of COST 275. These were Speaker Recognition, Face Recognition/ other image-based biometrics, Applications and Data Fusion, and Assessment methods. The Action proposed pioneering work on: * The delivery of voice biometrics over the Internet, covering such issues as packet loss, compact encoding, and data security. * The provision of a speech database degraded, by simulating the adverse effects in real applications, including transmission over the internet. * The extensive investigations into face localisation and recognition, signature, palm, hand-geometry, and fingerprint * The development of a Windows-based software toolkit for introducing various types of degradation into images, this degraded image database, which is considered another important output of the Action, covers a range of effects including packet loss, compression, noise, background variation etc. The activities within COST 275 also led to the development of a protocol for integrating three well-known European databases into a single multimodal database. The protocol defines a large cohort of virtual individuals based on five classes of biometrics. This is beneficial for further enhancing both investigative work and assessment of biometric authentication systems. The protocol also includes guidelines for biometric authentication evaluation. These guidelines detail different structures for training and testing data, and also incorporate different fusion strategies. The main impact of the Action COST 275 was in creating of a new official framework for common support of investigation of biometrics-based recognition of people over the Internet, which did not exist in Europe at the beginning of this Action. During the operation of this Action, new scientific projects in the area were initiated both on national level and in Europe. The best example of this is a Network of Excellence in FP6.
