His main research interests cover biological and artificial vision, biometrics, robotic navigation and visuo-motor coordination.

He is author of more than 80 scientific papers in main conferences and international journals. In 2000 he was the chairman for the Int.l workshop on "Advances in Facial Image Analysis and Recognition Technology" and in 2002 for the Int.l workshop on "Biometric Authentication".

He is associate editor for the journals Image and Vision Computing and Pattern Recognition. Since 2003 he is the director of the "Int.l Summer School on Biometrics". He is member of the program committee in severeal international conferences such as ECCV, IEEE CVPR, IAPR ICB, IEEE Face and Gesture Recognition and reviewer for many scientific journals, such as IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, IEEE Trans. On SMC, Image and Vision Computing, Int.l Journal of Computer Vision and CVGIP. Prof. Tistarelli was the general chair of the IEEE AutoId conference and he was the general chair of the 3rd IEEE/IAPR Int.l Conference on Biometrics, to be held in Alghero in June 2009 and of the 8th edition hold in Phuket, Thailand. He is a fellow member of IAPR and Senior member of IEEE. He is the first vice President of IAPR.