A New Direction for Biometrics

Apr 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Jacqueline Emigh

BIOMETRIC IDENTIFICATION KEEPS TURNING UP in a bigger assortment of flavors. Although most of today's biometric technology is still based on old-style fingerprinting, government agencies are also trying out iris scanning and facial recognition, experts say. Also emerging are more exotic variations that use DNA samples and handwritten signatures to help identity people electronically.

In January, for example, the public school system in Freehold, N.J. installed an iris scanning system aimed at getting a better grip on access to school buildings by school visitors. Meanwhile, Illinois has launched a facial recognition system designed to thwart identity theft by preventing fraudulent drivers' licenses.

And an agency, known as the Mexican Registry, now incorporates locks of hair and signatures on old letters into a system for locating missing persons in Mexico and bordering U.S. states.

According to Jim Miller, president of biometrics vendor ImageWare Systems Inc., San Diego, Calif., some Mexican workers trying to get back home from the United States. have lost their lives along the border due to the blistering desert heat in summer months. Loved ones fearing the worst can now bring in items such as photos, fingerprints, locks of hair and signatures on old documents in an effort to find out if anything bad has happened. “If the person is found deceased, this eases repatriation,” say Miller, whose company is working with the registry on implementing the system.

But alternatively, the missing person might turn up in a hospital, a prison, or healthy and free somewhere in the United States or Mexico. ImageWare now counts seven different biometric ID technologies as “mainstream,” Miller says.

Aside from DNA and signature technology — and the more garden-variety fingerprint, facial and iris offerings — Miller points to palm and voice recognition as other mainstream biometric options.

“You can get even more esoteric than that,” he adds. “There are even biometric technologies for measuring the gait of somebody's walk. But right now, we are not likely to receive too many requests saying, ‘We would like to get a quote from you for a biometric system for measuring people's gaits.’”

Mohamed Lazzouni, chief technology officer at identity technology vendor Viisage, Billerica, Mass., notes that innovation is also being driven by other government initiatives, which call for the use of both fingerprint and facial recognition identification.

These include passport and border crossing programs, such as US-Visit and the Border Management Initiative, as well as Real ID, an effort to achieve consistency among driver's licenses issued by various states in the United States.

But fingerprint reading is still the mainstay of the biometrics industry. “Government has been the biggest early adopter of biometric technology from the beginning. And early on, law enforcement set fingerprints as a standard,” Miller says.

Still, with pricing coming down on other biometrics, and technologies improving, facial and iris technologies are starting to consume more of the ID pie, experts agree.

For one thing, many people still associate fingerprinting with police blotters. “People think, ‘I'm not a criminal. So why do you want my fingerprint, and what are you going to do with it?’” Miller says.

Moreover, fingerprints are not always an entirely accurate way of determining identity, says Ray Bolling of Eyemetric Identity Systems, New Egypt, N.J., a company that is a technology partner of Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto, Calif. Eyemetric is the systems integrator that installed Freehold public schools' iris scanning system.

“There are plenty of people out there who know how to spoof fingerprint systems,” Bolling says. “Criminals know how to grind down (the skin on their fingers) to where the fingerprints will be hard to read.”

In contrast, iris scanning systems are almost impossible to fool, Bolling says.

Iris scanning provides a total of 220 identification points, in comparison to anywhere from seven to 22 identification points for fingerprints.

“From the age of 18 months to two years onward, a person's iris remains stable,” he says. Also according to Bolling, the iris remains unaffected even by lasik surgery, a form of eye surgery performed to prevent the need for glasses or contact lenses.

The new iris scanning implementation in Freehold follows an earlier deployment by Eyemet, Plumsted, N.J. Both in-school iris scanning deployments have been funded through the U.S. Dept. of Justice's National Institute of Justice.

Based on federal government feedback from the first deployment, Eyemetrics applied for and received a second grant. The resulting program in Freehold is evaluating the acceptance of iris scanning in a more culturally diverse environment, while also introducing new visitor management capabilities.

Participation in Freehold's iris scanning effort is voluntary. But adults who go through the enrollment process are entitled to enter the school building automatically, upon peering into a special camera at the door and being recognized by the system.

Otherwise, the visitor must ring the doorbell at the front door and wait for a school employee to go to a window, take a look outside, and physically open the door. “The (main) incentive for parents is peace of mind,” Bolling says.

So far, the deployment in Freehold shows no difference in levels of voluntary participation across different racial and ethnic groups, Bolling adds.

The system in Freehold uses Microsoft Windows 2003-based server hardware from Hewlett-Packard, a Microsoft SQL Server backend database, iris recognition cameras from LG Electronics, OCR (optical character recognition) scanning and a digital camera for snapping photos of enrollees. The digital photos are used for producing visitor badges. Each badge carries a photo of the visitor, along with a photo of the child being visited or taken out of school by the adult. The school department also scans the driver's license of participating adults. “But they are not storing copies of the driver's licenses in the database,” Bolling says. “Instead, they're just using the OCR scanning to capture last name, first name and street address, which is put into a database table.”

Bolling suggests a system such as Freehold's might curb “child snatching,” by making it harder for known offenders — or even parents who have lost custody rights — to get into the building.

Other experts, through, cite lingering barriers to iris scanning. Lazzouni points out that iris scanning is also being used at airports in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands among highly traveled corporate executives. At these airports, selected frequent fliers, who submit to iris scanning, are given speedier processing through customs.

“These (air travelers) have habits that are highly predictable,” Lazzouni says. “They are not likely to turn out to be ‘bad guys.’ And for iris scanning to be effective, participation must be voluntary.”

Facial recognition is on the upswing, too. For instance, Viisage has worked with the office of the Illinois Secretary of State (ILSOS) to institute a system geared to curbing identity theft. Operated chiefly by ILSOS's Driver Services Department and SOS Police Department, the new system in Illinois already checks its own database of photo images every night in search of duplications. “The state wants to make sure, for example, that a person who has been issued a driver's license does not already hold one under another name,” Lazzouni says.

Ultimately, the system will also be able to compare photo images in its own database with those in other databases, Lazzouni adds. Some critics contend that, at this point, facial recognition works well only with small databases of images.

But Lazzouni counters that just about any type of biometric system can operate “flawlessly” when the right conditions are in place.

Another Viisage customer, the Pinellas County (Fla.) Sheriff's Department, has used facial recognition in tandem with a booking system to verify identity. Pinellas County's Lt. Jim Main later adapted the technology to be the foundation for criminal investigations in several Florida correctional facilities.

To accommodate the widening panopoly of biometric technologies, some vendors are adopting highly flexible product and company structures. In creating identity solutions for customers, Viisage does not make a distinction between physical identity and “logical” — or computer-based — identity, according to the chief technology officer. The four processes pinpointed by Viisage include adjudication, “for making sure the identity is the right one;” enrollment and registration; issuance of proof of identity; and usage.

Proof of identity might consist of a badge or passport, for physical identity applications or a piece of software known as a “token” for logical identity.

“The usage process dictates what one needs (the proof of identity) for — whether it's to get privileged (access) to health care (records) or to go into a school and get a child out of class, for example,” Lazzouni says.

Viisage uses both “buy and build” to produce appropriate biometric solutions for customers.

Advancements in biometric technologies keep coming. By this spring, for example, the evaluation in the Freehold schools is expected to add several new enhancements.

“If a child ever turns up missing, the school will now be able to get the child's photo out to law enforcement officials right away,” Bolling says.

In addition, photos of parents who are no longer “active” in the system — because they have recently lost child custody rights, for instance — will start to “turn up red,” alerting school personnel not to allow access. The public schools of Freehold will also move from single-eye to dual-eye iris scanning cameras, making it easier for authorized visitors to “line up their eyes” for the camera correctly upon trying to enter the school.

Certain biometric identifiers will probably continue to be used only for highly specialized purposes. “DNA is really suited mainly to forensics investigations,” Miller says.

But experts largely agree that some of the other biometric technologies now catching hold in government sectors will ultimately get additional play in the worlds of business and commerce.

The key to broader biometrics usage is to remove complexity, Miller says. “Most people do not hold Ph.D.s in advanced biometrics research,” he says.

“If you create systems that one can use, you can drive biometrics further into hospitals and banks, for example. There, biometrics could be used for safeguarding health and financial records.”

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© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

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