Biometric Systems (eBook)

Biometric Systems provides practitioners with an overview of the principles and methods needed to build reliable biometric systems. It covers three main topics: key biometric technologies, design and management issues, and the performance evaluation of biometric systems for personal verification/identification. The four most widely used technologies are focused on - speech, fingerprint, iris and face recognition.

Key features include: in-depth coverage of the technical and practical obstacles which are often neglected by application developers and system integrators and which result in shortfalls between expected and actual performance; and protocols and benchmarks which will allow developers to compare performance and track system improvements.

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The use of computers to recognize humans from physical and behavioral traits dates back to the digital computer evolution of the 1960s. But even after decades of research and hundreds of major deployments, the field of biometrics remains fresh and exciting as new technologies are developed andoldtechnologiesareimprovedandfieldedinnewapplications.Wor- wide over the past few years,there has been a marked increase in both g- ernment and private sector interest in large-scale biometric deployments for accelerating human-machine processes, efficiently delivering human services, fighting identity fraud and even combating terrorism. The p- pose of this book is to explore the current state of the art in biometrics- tems and it is the system aspect that we have wished to emphasize. By their nature, biometric technologies sit at the exact boundary of the human-machineinterface.Butlikealltechnologies,bythemselvestheycan provide no value until deployed in a system with support hardware, n- work connections, computers, policies and procedures, all tuned together to work withpeople to improve some real business process within a social structure.