Bio-metrics

Incongruent Bio-metrics:

There are some unique characteristics or features for all humans which will not match to any other one. For example, the palm impression of an individual will do be unique and will not match any other one. This is the secret in the birth of a human.
So, the police people maintain the records of the palm print of the culprits and create a database. When any crime happens, they collect the palm prints from the crime spot and checks out with the maintained data base. Similarly, there are some more unique characters which don’t match. They are:

• Iris and Retina
• Saliva and Tongue print
• Voice
• Ear shape
• Human face
• Finger and Palm print
• Signature
• Vein
• DNA
• Body odor

With these biological factors, the bio-metric technology is framed and is being used.

Bio-metric Technology:

Biometric technology is defined as the “automated method of identifying or authenticating the identity of a living person based on a physiological or behavioral characteristic.”

Identity verification in computer systems is usually done with, cards, passwords, PIN and so forth. But, these may often be forgotten, disclosed or changed. With the help of biometric technologies, we can design a reliable and accurate identification/verification technique. It may be based on the special biometrics of the person as described above. It is mainly based on Pattern recognition. On compared with the traditional checking methods, these methods possess the following advantages:

• The person to be identified is required to be physically present at the time of identification.
• Since the identification is a biological factor, the need to remember a password or carry a token is aborted.

Let us discuss about all the biometric technologies, one by one in detail.

Bio-metric Technologies and Bio-metric Devices:

1. Fingerprint Technology:

Fingerprint biometric is an automated digital version of the old ink-and-paper method used for more than a century for identification, primarily by law enforcement agencies. Each finger consists of unique patterns of lines. The biometric device requires each user to place a finger on a plate for the print to be read.
The Bio-metric device used for this purpose is the finger print scanner. This finger print scanner acquires an image of a fingerprint either by optical scanning or capacitance sensing. Fingerprint scanning uses specialized devices to capture information about a person’s fingerprint, which information is used to authenticate the person at a later time.

Fingerprint scanners do not capture entire fingerprints; instead, they record small details about fingerprints, called minutiae. For example, a scanner will pick a point on a fingerprint and record what the ridge at that point looks like (as seen in Figure), which direction the ridge is heading, and so on. By picking enough points, the scanner can be highly accurate. A biometrics system can identify a fingerprint from its ridge-flow pattern; ridge frequency; location and position of singular points; type, direction, and location of key points; ridge counts between pairs of minutiae; and location of pores. The number of minutiae per fingerprint can vary, but a high-quality fingerprint scan will contain between 60 and 80 minutiae.