Cryptography/Biometrics

Biometrics

1. "Biometrics" is the science of human identity recognition based on physiological or behavioural characteristics that are unique to each individual.

2. Due to recent advances in the use of Biometrics in Passport Documents, ATM, Credit Card, Cellular Phone, PDA, Airport Check-in, Electronic Banking, web Access, Network Logon, Laptops Data Security there are presently research activities concerning the following areas:

a. Advanced finger recognition: it focuses on the finger retrieval from large database which is crucial part of the automatic fingerprint identification system. Conventional exclusive fingerprint classification partitions fingerprints into a few pre-specific non-overlapping classes(usually 4 or 5 classes) based on the Henrry classes. This limits the efficiency the efficiency of the fingerprint indexing. The continuous fingerprint classification overcome limitation of the number of classes. However, the exhaustive search of the whole fingerprint database required by this approach could be time-consuming. Research is going on in exploring the methods that inherits the merits of both the exclusive and continuous fingerprint classifications and overcomes the limitations and drawbacks of these two conventional approaches.

b. Multi-scale image processing of the fingerprint image to enhance fingerprint verification accuracy: Multi-scale image processing provides an effective way to find the optimal image enhancement of the fingerprints, which is very important to improve the quality of heavily corrupted fingerprint images.