Biometrics provides efficient and reliable solutions to recognize individuals. Growing interests on trustworthiness of authentication stimulate employment of biometric techniques. Nowadays, biometric applications can be found in diverse areas such as health monitoring, national ID cards, e-banking, e-commerce, etc. It rises to challenges of robustness, reliability, interoperability, scalability, system reliability and usability. Large-scale applications such as the European Union Visa Information System (VIS) and Unique Identification (UID) in India require high accuracy. Multimodal biometrics combined with fusion techniques can improve recognition performance. Efficient searching or indexing methods can accelerate identification efficiency. Additionally, quality of acquired biometric samples can strongly influence the performance. Quality assessment methods can notonly guarantee success of authentication but can also provide helpful feedback to system operators during the capturing process. Recently it was shown, that biometric recognition with low cost sensors embedded in mobile devices such as cell phones can improve deployment and acceptance of biometric systems. Moreover, concerns about security and privacy cannot be neglected. The relevant techniques in the area of presentation attack detection (liveness detection) and template protection are about to supplement biometric systems, in order to improve fake resistance, prevent potential attacks such as cross matching, identity theft etc. The BIOSIG 2013 conference addresses these issues and will present innovations and best practices that can be transferred into future applications. We invite stakeholders and technical experts to submit original research papers. Industrial contributions presenting lessons learned from practical usage, case study, recent results of prototypes, are also welcomed. Submissions should be full papers (max. 12 pages) in English. The topics of the conference include but are not limited to: Biometric standards and interoperability, multimodal and multi-biometrics (sensor, modality, sample, feature, score and decision fusion), security analysis of biometric components or systems, on-card comparison, fake resistance, liveness detection, aging of reference data, template protection, derivation of cryptographic keys from biometrics, biometric middleware, user interface design for biometric systems, biometric performance measurement, sample quality, best practices, usability, emerging applications, ethical, legal and socio-technological aspects, biometrics for public administrations.