Biometrics-based authentication and identification are emerging as the
most reliable method to authenticate and identify individuals.
Biometrics requires that the person to be identified be physically
present at the point-of-identification and relies on `something which
you are or you do' to provide better security, increased efficiency, and
improved accuracy. Automated biometrics deals with physiological or
behavioral characteristics such as fingerprints, signature, palmprint,
iris, hand, voice and face that can be used to authenticate a person's
identity or establish an identity from a database. With rapid progress
in electronic and Internet commerce, there is also a growing need to
authenticate the identity of a person for secure transaction
processing.
Designing an automated biometrics system to handle large population
identification, accuracy and reliability of authentication are
challenging tasks. Currently, there are over ten different biometrics
systems that are either widely used or under development. Some automated
biometrics, such as fingerprint identification and speaker verification,
have received considerable attention over the past 25 years, and some
issues like face recognition and iris-based authentication have been
studied extensively resulting in successful development of biometrics
systems in commercial applications. However, very few books are
exclusively devoted to such issues of automated biometrics.
Automated Biometrics: Technologies and Systems systematically
introduces the technologies and systems, and explores how to design the
corresponding systems with in-depth discussion. The issues addressed in
this book are highly relevant to many fundamental concerns of both
researchers and practitioners of automated biometrics in computer and
system security.
