The pace of development and adoption of biometric technologies accelerates

combination of accuracy, reliable performance and medium cost and are likely to be the technologies that we will see in the higher-level security systems in the coming years. The benefits of vein recognition in particular are significant — and the system is already proving highly effective in the banking sector in Japan. Palm vein technology was developed by Fujitsu and Finger Vein technology by Hitachi to help combat the increasing incidence of financial fraud and forgery, problems which have plagued many financial institutions in Japan for a number of years - at great cost to the country’s economy. One of the main benefits of vein readers is that, unlike fingerprints which change during childhood, the palm and finger vein pattern is established in the womb and is constant throughout a person’s life. The scanners operate on near-infrared light to read the palm vein pattern, which lies underneath the epidermis and so ca not be distorted by damage to the skin, age or the wearing of gloves. Vein readers also benefit from being non-contact — a particular advantage in environments such as health care, where hygiene may be an issue. Several of Japan’s major banks have been using palm and finger vein recognition at cash points, rather than PINs, for almost three years now and are confirming extraordinarily high standards of accuracy, with false rejection rates of 0.01 percent and false acceptance rates of less than 0.00008 percent. TDSi is working with both Fujitsu and Hitachi to incorporate this sensing technology into readers that can be deployed in physical access security applications. The first of these readers, PalmGarde (utilising Fujitsu’s Pam Secure sensor), was made available for sale in July 2007.

In terms of eye recognition, developments are being seen in both iris and retina scanning. Iris recognition offers a highly effective and reliable security option; each individual iris has around 260 unique characteristics and individuals’ irises tend not to experience great changes over time. Furthermore, recognition is only very marginally affected by the angle of image capture and ambient light conditions and the technology is equally effective through glasses, contact lenses, and goggles. Performance can be affected by certain eye problems, such as cataracts, and if the user is wearing coloured contact lenses or sunglasses — but these potential drawbacks can all be overcome with a degree of cooperation from the user. Davies says that TDSi has successfully integrated the Panasonic Iris reader system into our eXguard Pro software platform and have several installations ranging from banks, to pharmaceutical companies to construction sites deploying this solution to augment their physical access security regimes and processes.

Retinal scanning takes the technology a step further and examines the characteristics of patterns of blood vessels at the back of the eye. Although highly effective and incredibly accurate, this is a particularly time intensive process and is seen by users to be quite intrusive — each individual must look directly into a reader, where a low intensity light is directed through the pupil and performs a 360-degree retinal scan. Currently, both iris and retina recognition equipment are rather cost-prohibitive, although strides are being made to bring down the unit cost. Given the speed and user issues associated with retina scanning, “it is likely that it will only be used in the most high-security situations in the short to medium term, with iris recognition being the more dominant technology — potentially being used in conjunction with facial recognition systems,” says Davies.

As well as vein and eye recognition systems, there are a whole host of other biometric technologies at various stages of development and acceptance, some of which are set to come to market in future years. The list includes hand geometry, palm printing, dynamic grip recognition, facial thermography, facial feature recognition, and retina recognition — not to mention voice and signature recognition, keystroke dynamics and DNA identification. Of this list, voice scanning techniques are already proving to be highly successful in telephone applications, with several insurance companies already using voice scanning software to identify anomalies in speech patterns, indicating fraudulent behaviour. However, this technology is less likely to be widely adopted in physical applications. Davies concludes:

The next five years promise to be a time of continued change, as complex and expensive research programmes deliver refinements to current biometric systems and the development of completely new technologies and applications. Perhaps the future is actually staring us in the face, looking right into our eyes and sitting in the palm of our hand all at the same time.