| Personal identification and verification both play a critical role in our society. Today, more and more business activities and work practices are computerized. Ecommerce applications, such as e-banking, or security applications, such as building access, demand fast, real-time and accurate personal identification. Traditional knowledge- based or token-based personal identification or verification systems are tedious, time-consuming, inefficient and expensive.
Knowledge-based approaches use “something that you know” (such as passwords and personal identification numbers) for personal identification; token-based approaches, on the other hand, use “something that you have” (such as passports or credit cards) for the same purpose. Tokens (e.g., credit cards) are time-consuming and expensive to replace. Passwords (e.g., for computer login and e-mail accounts) are hard to remember. A company may spend $14 to $28 (U.S.) on handling a password reset, and about 19% of help-desk calls are related to the password reset problem. This may suggest that the traditional knowledge-based password protection is unsatisfactory. Since these approaches are not based on any inherent attribute of an individual in the identification process, they are unable to differentiate between an authorized person and an impostor who fraudulently acquires the “token” or “knowledge” of the authorized person. These shortcomings have led to biometrics identification or verification systems becoming the focus of the research community in recent years.
Biometrics, which refers to automatic recognition of people based on their distinctive anatomical (e.g., face, fingerprint, iris, etc.) and behavioral (e.g., online/off-line signature, voice, gait, etc.) characteristics, is a hot topic nowadays, since there is a growing need for secure transaction processing using reliable methods. Biometricsbased authentication can overcome some of the limitations of the traditional automatic personal identification technologies, but still, new algorithms and solutions are required. |