rd It is a pleasure and an honour both to organize ICB 2009, the 3 IAPR/IEEE Inter- tional Conference on Biometrics. This will be held 2–5 June in Alghero, Italy, hosted by the Computer Vision Laboratory, University of Sassari. The conference series is the premier forum for presenting research in biometrics and its allied technologies: the generation of new ideas, new approaches, new techniques and new evaluations. The ICB series originated in 2006 from joining two highly reputed conferences: Audio and Video Based Personal Authentication (AVBPA) and the International Conference on Biometric Authentication (ICBA). Previous conferences were held in Hong Kong and in Korea. This is the first time the ICB conference has been held in Europe, and by Programme Committee, arrangements and by the quality of the papers, ICB 2009 will continue to maintain the high standards set by its predecessors. In total we received around 250 papers for review. Of these, 36 were selected for oral presentationand 93 for poster presentation. These papers are accompanied by the invited speakers: Heinrich H. Bülthoff (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tüb- gen, Germany) on “What Can Machine Vision Learn from Human Perception?”, - daoki Furui (Department of Computer Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology) on “40 Years of Progress in Automatic Speaker Recognition Technology” and Jean-Christophe Fondeur (SAGEM Security and Morpho, USA) on “Large Scale Deployment of Biom- rics and Border Control”.