Biometric Recognition: How Do I Know Who You Are?
Anil K. Jain
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Michigan State 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 services. The purpose of establishing the 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 behavioral characteristics. Biometrics allows us to confirm or establish an individual’s identity based on who she is, rather than by what she possesses (e.g., an ID card) or what she knows (e.g., a password). Current biometric systems make use of identifiers such as fingerprints, hand geometry, iris, face and voice to establish an identity. Biometric systems also introduce an aspect of user convenience. For example, they alleviate the need for a user to remember multiple passwords 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 the 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, known 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 performance, 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 Networks 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 Simon Guggenheim fellowship and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award. He delivered the 2002 Pierre Devijver lecture sponsored by the International 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 for Clustering Data, Prentice-Hall 1988, BIOMETRICS: Personal Identification in Networked Society, Kluwer 1999, and Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition, Springer 2003 which received the 2003 PSP Award from the Association of American Publishers.
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