50 years of biometric research: Accomplishments, challenges, and opportunities

Biometrics: In Search of Identity and Security (Q & A)

“…of a biometric system. Existing individuality methods use feature representation or match score, but encounter lack of robust statistical models and entropy functions to accurately characterize intra-and inter-subject variations [4]. All in all, genotypic (genetically determined traits, e.g., DNA), phenotypic (traits determined through the interaction of genotype, development, and environment, e.g., fingerprint), and behavioral (traits determined by human activities, e.g., signature) biometric characteristics are high, medium and low in their uniqueness strength, respectively [2].…”

“…Unlike password or token-based systems, biometric systems-being inherently probabilistic endeavordo not produce perfect match decision [6]. The imperfect accuracy of biometric systems occurs mainly because two samples of the same biometric trait belonging to the same person are not exactly same owing to change in user's trait (e.g., bruises and ageing), user's interaction with the sensor (e.g., pose), imperfect imaging condition (e.g., sensor noise), ambient conditions (e.g., illumination), feature representation limitation (i.e., failing to retain invariances and discriminatory information in different patterns from the same class), and poor matching ability [4]. Thus, a biometric system makes two types of errors: (i) False Match or False Accept Rate (FMR or FAR) -mistaking biometric samples from two different persons to be from the same person; (ii) False NonMatch or False Reject Rate (FNMR or FRR) -mistaking two biometric samples from the same person to be from two different persons.…”

“…4 The future is almost here. Across the globe biometric technology has virtually arrived in our daily lives ranging from border crossing, surveillance to mobile devices.…”

“…5 Despite recent advances, biometrics still has to deal with many technical, societal, legal and standardization challenges. The key technical issue surrounding biometrics is the low performances in the wild (also know as unconstrained biometric recognition) [4]. In the wild, by definition, exhibit large range of disparity seen in everyday life, which includes variability in illumination, pose, imaging modalities, and occlusions to name a few (see Fig.…”

“…Though there exist several biometrics survey/review papers [4-6, 9, 10, 15] and books [2,3,11], their scopes are limited. For instance, [4] is focused mainly on physical biometric traits. [5,6,9,10,15] discuss only about mobile-, wearable-, behavioral-, and softbiometrics, respectively.…”