BIOMETRICS

BIOMETRICS – an overview

Biometrics, the science of applying unique physical or behavioral characteristics to verify an individual’s identity, is the basis for a variety of rapidly expanding applications for both data security and access control. Numerous biometrics approaches currently exist, including voice recognition, iris scanning. Facial recognition and others, but fingerprint recognition is increasingly being acknowledged as the most practical technology for low cost, convent and reliable security. The project provides new standard for compact, reliable and low-cost fingerprint authentication.

The manual method of fingerprint indexing results in a highly skewed distribution of fingerprints into bins (types): most fingerprints fell into a few bins and this resulted in search inefficiencies. Fingerprint training procedures were time-intensive and slow. Further, demands imposed by painstaking attention needed to visually match the fingerprints of varied qualities, tedium of monotonic nature of the work, and increasing workloads due to a higher demand on fingerprint identification services, all prompted the law enforcement agencies to initiate research into acquiring fingerprints through electronic medium and automatic fingerprint identification based on the digital representation of the fingerprints. These efforts have led to development of automatic, semi-automatic fingerprint identification systems over the past few decades. We attempt to present current state-of-the-art in fingerprints sensing and identification technology.