An Overview Of Biometric Technology

Biometrics comes from the Greek words bios meaning life and metron meaning measure. Biometrics is defined as the study of how to uniquely identify humans based on one or more intrinsic physical or behavioral traits.

Biometric Technology (also called biometric authentication) is technology developed to measure and analyze human physical and behavioral characteristics for the purpose of identity authentication. Some examples of intrinsic physical characteristics are fingerprints, facial patterns, hand measurements, eye retinas, and irises. Examples of behavioral characteristics are gait, typing patterns, and signature.

Typically an individual registers one or more physical or behavioral characteristics with the system which is then processed by a numerical algorithm and entered into a database. A digital representation of the biometric is created in the database. When this takes place the new user is considered to be "enrolled."

Now every time a user wishes to use the system, he or she must present the biometric being used for authentication by the system for processing. The biometric is converted with the numerical algorithm and the system searches the database looking for a match.

A Hamming distance is used for comparison purposes. It is a measurement of how similar to bit strings are. Identical results have a Hamming distance of zero while completely dissimilar bit strings have a Hamming distance of 1. The percentage of dissimilar bits is the Hamming distance.

Biometric technology is not yet perfected. Some systems have achieved accuracy rates of over 99% while others are barely over 60%. Measuring the accuracy of biometric systems is a bit arbitrary though. For example, if a system is set up with a signature consisting of the first initial and the last name as the biometric and an authorized person provides a full first and last name and is rejected, should that be considered a false reject? Some say yes and some say no. So there is no universal standard for measuring the accuracy of systems incorporating biometric technology.

There are other measures used compare the performance of biometric systems. The false accept rate is known as the FAR. The false reject rate is called the FRR. And the FTE or FER is known as the failure to enroll rate. FRR measures the percentage of legitimate users who are denied access while the FAR measures the percentage of unauthorized users who are erroneously granted access.

But biometric technology is relatively new and rapidly improving. It shows great promise as a method for identifying individuals with great accuracy. As a matter of fact, in the near future all U.S. Passports will be required to have an RFID chip containing biometric information for identification and authentication purposes.

Biometric technology is also being developed for use in homes, offices, and cars. There will soon be a day when you'll be able to throw away your keys. All you'll need to enter your home or office or start your car will be a biometric such as a fingerprint.