Biometric Recognition: How Do I Know Who You Are?

1

Biometric Recognition: How Do I Know Who You Are?




Anil K. Jain


Department of C
omputer Science and Engineering

Michigan Sta
te University


http://biometrics.cse.msu.edu



Abstract

A wide variety of systems
require reliable personal recognition schemes to either confirm or
determine the
identity of an individual

requesting their servi
ces. The purpose of establishing th
e
identity

is to ensure that only a legitimate user, and not anyone else, accesses the rendered services.
Examples of such applications include secure access to buildings,
airports, computer systems,
cellular phones and ATM machines
.
Biometric recognition,

or simply
biometrics
, refers to the
automatic recognition of individuals based on their physiological and/or behavi
oral characteristics.
Biometrics allows us

to confirm or establish an
individual’s identity based on
who she is
, rather
than by
what she pos
sesse
s

(e.g., an ID card) or
what she know
s

(e.g., a password). Current
biometric systems make use of
identifiers such as
fingerprints, hand geometr
y, iris, face and voice
to establish an

identit
y. B
iometric systems also introduce an aspect of user conveni
enc
e
. For
example, they alleviate the need for a

user to remember

multiple

pa
sswords associated with
different

applications
.
A biometric system that uses a single biometric trait for recognition has to
contend with problems related to non
-
universality of t
he trait, spoof attacks, limited degrees of
freedom, large intra
-
class variability, and noisy data. Some of these problems can be

addressed by
integrating the evidence presented by multiple biometric traits of a user (e.g.,

face and iris
). Such
systems, kn
own as
multimodal biometric systems
, demonstrate substantial improvement in
recognition performance.
In this talk, we will present various applications of biometrics, challenges
associated in designing
fingerprint biometric systems
,
state
-
of
-
the
-
art perfor
mance
, individuality of
biometric identifiers,

and
fusion strategies available to implement a multimodal biometric system.


Anil Jain is a University Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Computer Science &
Engineering at Michigan State University.

He was the Department Chair during 1995
-
99. His
research interests include statistical pattern recognition, exploratory pattern analysis, texture
analysis, document image analysis and
biometric authentication
.

Several of his papers have been
reprinted in edited volumes on image processing and pattern recognition. He received the best
paper awards in 1987 and 1991 from the Pattern Recognition Society. He also received the 1996
IEEE Transactions on Neural Network
s Outstanding Paper Award. He is a fellow of the IEEE,
ACM, and International Association of Pattern Recognition. He has received a
Fulbright

Research
Award, a
John S
imon Guggenheim fellowship

and an
Alexander von Humboldt
Research Award.
He delivered the 2002
Pierre Devijver lecture

sponsored by the Interna
tional Association of Pattern
Recognition. He holds six patents in the area of fingerprint matching. He is the author of a number
of books, including
Algorithms f
or Clustering Data
, Pr
entice
-
Hall 1988,
BIOMETRICS: Personal
Identification in Networked Society
, Kluwer 1999, and
Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition
,
Springer 200
3 which received the 2003
PSP A
ward

from the Association of American Publishers.