Biometrics: a grand challenge (original) (raw)

Reliable person recognition is an important problem in diverse businesses. Biometrics, recognition based on distinctive personal traits, has the potential to become an irreplaceable part of many identification systems. While successful in some niche markets, the biometrics technology has not yet delivered its promise of foolproof automatic human recognition. With the availability of inexpensive biometric sensors and computing power, it is becoming increasingly clear that broader usage of biometric technologies is being stymied by our lack of understanding of four fundamental problems: (i) How to accurately and efficiently represent and recognize biometric patterns? (ii) How to guarantee that the sensed measurements are not fraudulent? (iii) How to make sure that the application is indeed exclusively using pattern recognition for the expressed purpose (function creep )? (iv) How to acquire repeatable and distinctive patterns from a broad population? Solving these core problems will be required to move biometrics into mainstream applications and may also stimulate adoption of other pattern recognition applications for providing effective automation of sensitive tasks without jeopardizing individual freedoms. For these reasons, we view biometrics as a grand challenge -"a fundamental problem in science and engineering with broad economic and scientific impact 1 ".