Davide Maltoni is a Full Professor at University of Bologna (DISI - Dept. of Computer Science and Enginnering).
He teaches Machine Learning and Computer Architectures at University of Bologna, Cesena.
His research interests are in the areas of Computer Vision, Machine Learning and Computational Neuroscience. Please refer to the tab Research for a selection of papers in the different areas.
His main bibliometric indicators (from Google Scholar profile)
Most of his applied research is in the field of Biometric Systems (fingerprint recognition, face recognition, hand recognition, performance evaluation of biometric systems). Davide Maltoni is co-founder and co-director of the Biometric Systems Laboratory (BioLab), which is internationally known for its research and publications in the field. Davide Maltoni (together with other BioLab member):
- (1997) proposed the first direct gray-scale minutiae detection approach;
- (2000) developed SFinGe, an effective method for generating realistic synthetic fingerprint databases, nowadays largely used for performance evaluation of biometric systems;
- (2000-2006) organized four International Competitions for Fingerprint Verification Algorithms (FVC2000, FVC2002, FVC2004 and FVC2006). FVC databases are nowadays the most widely adopted benchmark for fingerprint recognition;
- (2002) published the first fingerprint classification algorithm able to meet the FBI fingerprint classification requirements;
- (2009) proposed Minutiae Cylinder Code (MCC), a recognized state-of-the-art fingerprint matcher capable of performing more than 150 million comparisons per second on a single PC (CPU+GPU);
- (2010) launched FVC-onGoing a web-platform for evaluation of biometric recognition algorithms with about 2K registered participants and 8K submitted algorithms;
- (2014) first demonstrated the feasibility of enrolling double-identity face biometrics in electronic documents (morphing attack).
- (2017) introduced one of the first effective techniques, known as Face Demorphing, for detecting face morphing attacks.
Davide Maltoni is co-author of the monography Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition whose third edition was published by Springer in 2022. The first edition of the book received the PSP award from the Association of American Publishers as best monography in Computer Science for 2003. At 2024 the book has been cited more than 7000 times.
In the field of Machine Learning, he was among the first researchers to address Continual Learning with deep neural networks. Neural networks are affected by a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting, which makes incremental training particularly challenging: when networks are trained on new information, they learn it effectively but simultaneously forget previously acquired knowledge.
Davide Maltoni, together with his collaborators:
- (2017) introduced CORe50, one of the most widely used benchmarks for Continual Learning in the field of Robotic Vision;
- (2018) co-founded ContinualAI, the largest non-profit research organization which aims to catalyze continual learning research;
- (2019) proposed CWR and AR1, among the first effective algorithms for Class-Incremental Learning;
- (2020) introduced Latent Replay, which, in combination with CWR, represents one of the most efficient techniques for training deep neural networks on resource-constrained architectures;
- (2021) supervised the development of Avalanche, a popular open-source Python library for Continual Learning research;
- (2024) demonstrated the effectiveness of Continual Learning techniques in robot navigation and SLAM.
Davide Maltoni coordinated University of Bologna unit in the following EU Projects: BioSec (FP6), Fidelity (FP7), Ingress (FP7), SOTAMD (H2020), iMars (H2020) and Einstein (Horizon Europe) with a total funding exceeding 2.5 M€.
He holds four patents on Fingerprint Recognition, one patent on Videosurveillance and one patent on Augmented Reality.
He served as Associate Editor for the international journals: Pattern Recognition, IEEE Transactions on Information Forensic and Security and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis Machine Intelligence.
Davide Maltoni he has been elected IAPR (International Association for Pattern Recognition) Fellow 2010. He received the prestigious Senior Biometrics Investigator Award (SBIA) from IAPR in 2024 and was elevated to IEEE Fellow in 2025.
