Many areas are seeing the spread of biometrics. These include military electronics, law enforcement, border protection, industrial and business security, medical devices, consumer electronics and financial transactions. The most important reasons for the rising interest in biometrics comes from the forced emphasis on safety and security because of increasing instances of terrorism, fraud and identity theft.
Biometrics technology is poised for sustained growth. This is also evident from the figures in the recent market research report released by Acuity Market Intelligence. According to this report by Frost and Sullivan, the compounded annual growth rate or CAGR of biometrics technology is expected to be nearly 10.69%, with the annual market revenue reaching $11 billion by 2017.
According to the report, biometric technology earned about $300 million in 2008 in countries such as Africa, the Middle East and in Europe. The report expects this market to reach about $1.5 billion by 2015, representing a CAGR or 25.5%. Similarly, the forecast for North American revenue in biometrics is $9.44 billion.
A major factor in this growth has been Government projects worldwide such as the national identity schemes and e-passports. The biometrics industry continues to lay their emphasis on practical and low-cost standardized approaches for ensuring user friendliness, non-invasiveness and optimal security.
Biometrics employs various modalities for personal identification and verification techniques, with each providing different levels of authenticity. These include signature recognition, voice recognition, vein and palm recognition, hand recognition, facial feature recognition and fingerprinting. A recent addition, the holographic method, has gained popularity. Along with personal data on databases, any of the above modalities can improve authentication and identification greatly.
The public identifies fingerprinting as the most common technique related to biometrics, followed by iris recognition. With improved optical sensing, thermal and capacitive technologies, fingerprinting is improving on several fronts.
For example, NIST or the National Institute of Standards and Technology are promoting a new software technology, the AFEM or Automated Feature Extraction and Matching. This speeds up the manual portion of latent fingerprint identification.
Under normal conditions, a fingerprint examiner has to mark carefully the distinguishing features of a partial or full latent print. This begins with the positions where ridges branch or end. Further identification proceeds when he enters the print into the FBI’s IAFIS or Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System.
Trial of the AFEM system on a data set of 835 latent prints and 100,000 fingerprints has shown promising results. Used in real case examinations, the AFEM system demonstrated high accuracy for the latent prints and fingerprints, as high as 80% for half the prototypes.
For each latent print, the software filtered out the distinguishing features and compared them against the 100,000 fingerprints. Against each print, the software was able to provide a list of 50 probable candidates. When specialists compared the fingerprints by hand, they were able to find identities within the top 10.
NIST researchers are working closely with the law-enforcing agencies such as FBI to develop a mobile ID platform. This will allow fingerprinting on the spot, eliminating the need for law-enforcement officials to take people to headquarters for fingerprinting.
