This form of biometry is another favorite of moviemakers. Heroes often access cars and secret underground tunnels by just mentioning a few key phrases into a little microphone. In fact, even the Nokia 3310 ha ndset allows one to record one’s voice to attach to a particular phone number, which you can later access by merely calling it out.

Of course, this doesn’t really qualify for the high-level biometrics we speak off, but the approach is similar to how a biometric device of this sort would work. Voice verification biometry, however, is not as effective because acoustics and other external disturbances interfere with the process.

Applications in our daily lives Biometrics are slowly but surely becoming standards of authentication in everyday life. Banks worldwide are already experimenting with retinal scans for ATM machines; laptops are being produced with built-in fingerprint scanners. There are more and more industries going the biometric way.

Imagine a very near future where your fingerprint becomes the key to your home, your voice the key to your cars and your eyes to your credit card. Imagine a world where every home will have at least one biometric device that’ll connect you to your local grocery store and your bank-a single retinal scan will enable you to order and pay for groceries.

Imagine smart cards that’ll let you pay for petrol at unmanned petrol pumps when used in conjunction with hand geometry. Imagine those same cards that will enable you to book airline tickets over the Internet while earning you precious air miles. Now imagine the world that’s secure! It’s closer than you think

This form of biometry is fairly straight­forward. It basically tries to match various facial characteristics such as distance between eyes, width of nose, cheekbones, jaw line and chin characteristics to arrive at an identity match. Using the captured image, the biometric software makes certain calculations to arrive at the right angle for matching the photograph to the stored sample template.

It then plots a series of points and measures the distance between them to arrive at a sample-this sample is then used to match against photographs stored in the database.

Facial recognition is mostly used by crime fighting and security units as checks against shady characters and known felons. The use of this form of biometry has found limited success in practical applications due to various factors such as facial features being covered by hair or hats, the reflection from spectacles, angle of captured image and poor lighting.

However, progress continues to be made in this area and future implementations look promising.

Hollywood filmmakers have a strange fascination for this form of biometry. This fascination probably stems from the fact that people understand much less about the eye than they do of hands and fingerprints. Besides, the technology looks pretty cool too. Now, though both these forms of biometry deal with the eye, iris and retinal scans follow two completely different methods of identification.

In iris scans, the iris is photographed using a fairly conventional CCD camera, and the resultant image is compared to the template image that’s stored in the database for iris characteristics such as filaments, crypts, striations and freckles.

Of both the eye scanning biometrics, iris scanning is less intrusive and the apparatus employed is much simpler as well. In fact, iris comparisons can even be done from two photographs-provided the iris is a minimum of 70 pixels, to capture the details of iris patterns.

Lets take the case of Sharbat Gula, National Geographic’s famous Afghan girl. The magazine’s ace photographer, Steve McCurry, first shot a picture of her in 1984 when she was just 12 years old. Later in 2002, when National Geographic began looking for their most famous cover girl, McCurry was skeptical that the woman they had tracked was really the one. Years of war and suffering had taken their toll, completely changing the way she looked. The most conclusive evidence turned out to be the iris comparisons made between two photographs taken 18 years apart. The woman they met was the girl they were looking for!

Moving on to retinal scanning, in this form of biometry, the capillaries at the back of the eye are analyzed. The scanning device uses a low-intensity light source­mostly infrared. A proper scan requires that the subject focus on a given point while a video camera captures the retinal pattern. This pattern is then converted into data that can be analyzed for matching purposes. Retinal scanning, though a fairly accurate form of biometry, does create problems for those using spectacles.

In the past, iris and retinal scanning was only used for restricting access to certain high-security departments in the US government and military-probably why filmmakers are so enamored by it.

Hands, by themselves, are not descriptive enough so as to result in positive identification. This form of biometry therefore, takes into consideration a combination of various factors such as size, shape, finger length and thickness, and other such details.

Hand geometry as a biometry is usually used in places where fingerprinting could be considered intrusive. With regards to its effectiveness, it needs to be mentioned that a fairly good sample can be obtained for verification if the biometric device takes enough criteria into the reckoning.

Certain devices can also measure hands from a three dimensional perspective to arrive at a much more accurate sample. Additionally, hand geometry can be easily combined with, say, fingerprinting, for better results.

Scotland Yard made the science of fingerprinting famous in 1905, the year it started using it for crime detection. Ever since, fingerprinting has played a very important role in forensics. Today, due to its widespread acceptance, fingerprint­scanning devices are one of the most common biometric devices available. In fact, even the registrar of Property Agreements in Mumbai has started making use of such a device to digitize co fingerprints of the parties involved in property transactions.

The fingerprinting devices used for security verifications, however, are slightly more complex. They follow various methods of identifying fingerprints that range from matching print patterns such as whorls, cusps and ridges, to the more in-depth matching offiner details that could include the matching of at least 15 different characteristics. Some finger scanning biometric devices can also detect whether the finger is live or not.           Fingerprint scanning is fairly accurate though large user-bases and improper use could sometimes pose a problem. Recently, such biometric devices are also being used in laptops as a method of authenticating its user.

Axis Software Pvt Ltd, a Pune-based outfit, is one biometric solution provider that specializes in fngerprint biometric solutions. It has initiated fingerprint-based          time and attendance systems for clients such as Surat Municipal Corporation and Nagpur Municipal Corporation. It has also provided fingerprint-based PC security to Garware Polyster Ltd (Aurangabad). Currently, they’re also working closely with CA Sat yam ASP to provide a fingerprint­based registration and verification solution for the RTO licensing system (Gujarat & Maharashtra RTO Project).

Most Hollywood directors treat biometrics as a technology of the future. Top-secret laboratories are accessed via a retina scan, a fingerprint scan gives you access to classified information, and hi-tech cars are powered up using voice recognition. But really, is biometrics a future technology, or is it something that has been in existence since ages?

What is Biometrics?

According to dictionary.com, biometrics is the statistical study of biological phenomena. Or, as the Oxford Dictionary would have it, the application of statistical methods to biological facts. Simply put, anything that considers physiological characteristics for identification, can be termed biometrics.

In the old days, people were identified by physical characteristics such as birthmarks and scars-that was biometrics then. Today, we have devices that do a similar job and more accurately.

Modern biometrics can trace its birth to the 1880s when Henry Faulds, a doctor and Sir Francis Galton, an anthropologist, in two separate publications, suggested the use of finger prints in crime detection -or rather, to the use it was put by Juan Vucetich, an Argentinean Police Inspector, in a murder case in 1892.

Since those days, techniques have been refined and newer ‘identifying techniques’ identified. As our understanding of physiological characteristics deepens along with our progress in technology we can expect newer biometric devices that measure newer physiological traits. But lets not get too ahead of ourselves, lets look at biometrics as it stands today.