SECURITY
Recognising imaging’s fingerprints
Tom Eddershaw looks at the imaging techniques used in fingerprint recognition systems, and the challenges manufacturers face in deploying the technology
T
he Touch ID security function on the iPhone 6 is one of the more high- profile examples of a commercial use of
fingerprint recognition, and while fingerprints and other biometric forms of identification are becoming more widely used, is biometric technology ready for large-scale deployment? Looking at commercially available reports,
the general market for biometric technology is around $11bn in 2014, noted Stephen Anderson, industry and market strategist at SPIE. He said that projections have this going to $27bn by 2019, at a CAGR of around 20 per cent. SPIE, the optics and photonics society, is in
the middle of analysing a number of market segments related to defence and security, biometrics being one of them. ‘My sense is that many biometric technologies are not quite ready for prime time as far as general consumer implementation is concerned but fingerprint recognition is coming,’ Anderson commented. So where does imaging come into all of this? Te term biometrics encompasses a number
of different technologies, but all use human characteristics as a security measure. Imaging is used in a number of these, including fingerprint, vein, iris, and facial and gait recognition. Applications can be found across the security market, from government level to personal security, but progress is being slowed by implementation cost and a lack of confidence in the technology, either its accuracy or the privacy issues associated with recording and storing personal information. In order to further uptake, Emanuela
Marasco, a post-doctoral associate researcher at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte’s department of computer science, believes improving public confidence in biometric technology is crucial. She explained that when considering the deployment of biometric technology, it is very much related to the acceptance degree of the users. ‘It depends on how willing the user is to give you biometric data; it’s a social concern,’ she said. Marasco will present research at SPIE DSS, the defence, security and sensing show to be
22 Imaging and Machine Vision Europe • April/May 2015
held in Baltimore, USA from 20-24 April. She explained one of the reasons for the lack of trust in the technology: ‘You can acquire fingerprint data for one purpose, but it could be used for something else. If a fingerprint biometric is stored it could be communicated to another device and then used for a purpose that might be unknown to the subject. Tis is obviously an invasion of privacy, because people don’t know whether their data is being used in unauthorised applications.’ Fingerprint biometric data is created from
an image by logging key minutiae, details within the fingerprint used for identification, such as ridges ending, beginning or forking. Marasco explained that these points are characterised by location in terms of x and y within the image, as well as orientation. ‘Tis is what we want to protect. If you consider the template of a fingerprint, and you have say 100 points characterised by these minutia points, you want to protect that.’ Tis can be done before feature extraction, or once there is an image template.
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