Introduction to Biometrics

Biometrical is the process of identifying a person based on few intrinsic behaviors both physical and mental. In the latest trend of IT world, we can say that biometrics can be used a more secured form of identity and recognition access management and access control. It is also used to identify human groups. Characteristics of Biometrical can be classified in to two types as below

Physiological Biometrics 

Physiological Biometrical are related to the shape of the body. Few examples are fingerprints, face recognition and DNA.

A biometric system can be used for the following two modes

Verification 

The biometric proof that was captured is stored in a template form and can used in a similar way how a smart card, user name or ID number systems work and follows the same methodologies for the verification and authentication process.

 Identification

A particular sample of biometric template is taken and compared with many samples available in the huge biometric database. A biometric database contains all the pre-defined and enrolled templates. This comparison results positive results only when the template being compared is already available in the huge database, and if it does not match, this matching result will be the base for catching the wrong authenticated entity across the biometric system being implemented.

The process of using the biometric system for the first time is called enrollment. Individual information is stored during the enrollment process. Note that it is crucial that storage and retrieval of such systems themselves be secure if the biometric system is to be robust. Below is the basic block diagram of a typical biometric system.

Sensor is the interface between the system and real word and this is the one which acquires the actual data. Most of the times it is an image acquisition system, but it can change according to the characteristics desired.

The second block i.e pre-processing removes the unnecessary artifacts from sensor and performs normalization like removing the noise from the speech to improve the input from the sensor.

The main operation of third block is to extract the feature needs and we can say this step is the most important one as there is a large scope for extracting the exact features in an optimal and cost effective system. A typical template is created by a number of tools like vectors, and these vectors considers many characteristics of an image that was captured for the purpose of biometric study.

A template can be explained as simple blue print of the characteristics that were captured from the original source of image. Few typical elements of the this particular measurement of biometric samples are not considered in the comparison algorithm of the template being used, to decrease the size of the file and also to ensure that the enrollee is protected in all the possible ways.

Use for Biometrics        

A typical Biometric applications is not only used to study the human authentication process, but also can be used to study the character and behavior changes of animals too. A typical example for the same is , a biometric system can be implemented to trace the race of a horse and also there is common biometric system in place where the famous pedigree company uses to check whether any dogs are being imported illegally.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *