• Biometric CCTV market to hit $3.2 billion in 2016

    Analysts project that the biometric CCTV market will be a $3.2 billion industry by 2016, with an annual growth rate of 33 percent; the security camera industry has already seen rapid growth as the private and public sector have installed surveillance systems to help combat crime and provide real-time information; over the next decade, analysts from the Homeland Security Research Corporation (HSRC) project that the next trend in this field will be the increasing integration of biometric technology into surveillance cameras; HSRC’s report projects that these technological developments will help drive the CCTV market and create significant growth opportunities for the security camera industry, biometric and IT systems manufacturers, and security systems integrators

  • Canada to use biometric scans for immigrant visas

    Canadian officials have confirmed that the government plans to introduce a biometric screening system for travellers seeking visas to Canada, but details on which countries will be enrolled in the system and when it will be implemented have been sparse; Last Friday, it was reported that the Canadian government had planned to launch the first phase of its $200 million electronic fingerprinting program in India due to concerns of rampant fraud on applications from that country; but a spokeswoman for the Immigration Ministry said the report was false and that the government was still discussing which countries would be a part of the program; the government expects to reach a decision in early fall or sometime in early 2012; the announcement comes as part of a government effort, first introduced in 2008, to use biometrics to secure Canada’s borders and minimize fraud

  • Researchers unveil biometric walk scanner

    Researchers from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom recently unveiled new biometric technology that is capable of identifying individuals by the way they walk; a professor in computer vision at the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and two PhD students have developed a system that can recognize a person by their gait with over 90 percent accuracy; individuals walking through a “biometric tunnel” were recorded on twelve cameras to create a unique signature that can be used to identify them later; researchers tried to fool the system by wearing different clothes, obscuring their faces with hats and motorcycle helmets, but the biometric system prevailed