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What Is Biometrics?
Biometrics can be defined as the technique of
studying the physical characteristics of a person such as
fingerprints, hand geometry, eye structure etc. to
establish his or her identity. This science is primarily
implemented to identify individuals.
Why Biometrics?
The use of biometrics is no longer restricted to
defense establishments or sensitive areas. An increased
need for security has prompted even everyday office
goers to install fingerprint recognition devices to boot up
their laptops, thumb drives and other daily use gadgets.
The question is, why? Why isn’t the 16-digit password
good enough? Simply because fingerprints are more
secure. A password is breakable and anyone with basic
knowledge of computers can crack passwords using the
myriad free programmers available on the Internet. For
obvious reasons, a fingerprint, however, is difficult to fake
without the help of the owner. It is also a lot more
convenient to simply place your finger on to a scanner
instead of remembering a long and complex series of
characters and their cases. To make matters worse, they
should, ideally, have no correlation whatsoever. So
essentially, for maximum security, your password should
be an alphanumeric word that doesn’t mean anything. Go
figure!
Fingerprint Scanning:
Humans have fingerprints for the exact same reason
that tyres have treads. It helps in better grip and, by a
bizarre twist of nature; different people have entirely
different sets of fingerprints, which enables identification.
A fingerprint is made up of ridges and valleys (lines and
the gaps separating them) and it is these ridges and
valleys which are scanned to verify the authenticity of a
print. To authenticate a set of prints, a scanner needs to
do two things: first, it needs to get the image of the prints
which are to be authenticated, and second, it needs to
actually go about the business of verifying them. The most
commonly used method of scanning is optical scanning.
An optical scanner has a CCD sensor (Charge Coupled
Device) similar to the ones used in digital cameras. There
is an array of light sensitive diodes photo sites). When
these diodes come in contact with light, they generate an
electrical signal. Every photo site records a pixel
representing the light it came in contact with. An analogue
to digital converter (ADC) system in the scanner processes
the electrical signals to generate digital representations of
the image. It is not necessary that the same kind of light
falls on all diodes. So what is generated is a mix of dark
and light areas, which together make up the image. The
Retinal Scanning
Despite being shown as the absolute cutting edge,
retinal scanning is actually rather old in the chronology of
technology innovations and research on this started way
back in the 1930s. For the retina to be canned, the user
looks through a small hole in the scanning device and
focuses on a particular point for the time period during
which, a low intensity light and a CCD analyze the layer of
blood vessels at the back of the eye for matching patterns
(akin to fingerprint checking) and validate or repudiate the
persons identity.
This technology is still not in the public domain
(unlike fingerprint recognition, which is) and is used only
to secure highly sensitive security areas.
Unlike fingerprints, there is absolutely no known
method of replicating a person’s retina and to use a dead
person’s retina is no good as it deteriorates too fast to be
of any help.
Iris Scan:
Iris Scan, though relating to the eye (like retinal scan)
uses a completely different method of identification. The
Iris is the colored ring surrounding the pupil. The scan
analyses the features that exist in this colored tissue.
Over 200 points can be used for comparison such as
the rings, furrows and freckles. The scan is done with a
regular camera and the subject stands about a foot from
the lens (of the camera) so it is a lot more convenient.
The Iris pattern is much more unique than a
fingerprint. A statistical analysis puts the probability of
two irises matching at 1 in 10 to the power 78 while the
population of humans on earth is roughly 7 billion that is 7
to the power 9.
Facial Recognition
While fingerprinting and retinal scanning are
relatively easy to administer, since the people going
through the process are aware of it and are consenting to
subject themselves to these measures, the main
application of facial recognition is in security wherein the
software is expected to pick a face out of, say, thousands
of passengers at the airport, and match it with a database
of wanted criminals and positively state whether or not
that face belongs to the guilty party.
To make the computer recognize a face from a
picture or a video feed is quite an achievement in itself,
but a bigger achievement is to identify clearly if the face is
that of the wanted man or not.
If you look in the mirror, or at a persons face for that
matter, you will notice that every face has certain
characteristics and distinguishable features, which allow
us to differentiate between two people. The equipment
used here is not really too fancy or cutting edge, and the
brains for this lie entirely in the software.
The software divides the face into 80 nodes, some of
the common ones being distance between eyes, width of
nose, and depth of eye sockets, cheekbones, jaw line, and
chin. The system generally needs to match between 14-25
nodes in order to obtain a positive ID.
Now, obviously, there are a lot of people coming in
and out of a place where this system is set up (stadiums,
airports etc). The real challenge is to recognize a face
instantaneously. To facilitate this, a database is created
with the help of an algorithm, which goes through the
characteristics of the faces and stores them as a string of
numbers. This string is called a face print.
The following are the broad steps utilized by facial
recognition software.
⑥ Face Detection: The camera pans around
looking for a face. The minute it encounters a face,
it starts scanning it and proceeds to identifying the
various nodes and taking measurements if possible.
Voice Recognition:
Like fingerprints and face attributes, every person
has a unique speech pattern. Voice recognition works by
first storing voice patterns and then using them as a
database to authenticate a subject.
Voice recognition is often confused with speech
recognition, which is a technology that converts speech to
text and the conversion software needs to go through
extensive training by the user before any suitable and
acceptable results are obtained.
Voice recognition works by noting a person’s voice
(physical characteristics of the vocal tract, the harmonic
and the resonant frequencies) and converts it into an
audio file which is known as a voice print.
During the creation of a voice print, the subject is
asked to choose a phrase and asked to repeat it. The
phrase should be 1 to 1.5 seconds in length since a
smaller phrase provides the system with too little data,
and beyond that, too much data. Both of these conditions
result in reduced accuracy. The problem with voice
recognition does not lie in its integrity since it’s near
impossible to fake a voice. The problem lies with the
technology we are using to implement it with.
In the confined environs of a test lab, the technology
is at par with other biometric technologies but in the real
world tests, it has to contend with background noise,
weather conditions, audio source and the like. Consider
these two scenarios:
First: First, say you need to get inside your house which is
“voice-locked”; meaning it has a voice recognition-based
security system.
Now, if there is traffic jam on the street in front of
your house, horns blaring, people screaming, the system
might refuse to authenticate you due to too much
background noise (try using voice dialing in your cell
phone in room full of chattering people and you’ll
understand what we are talking about).
In fact, it might also fail to authenticate you if you
have a sore throat or are suffering from a cold as it alters
your voice (and hence the voice print) quite considerably!