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.”
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© 2010 Penton Media Inc.
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