What we used to know about biometrics is that it is a technology for militaries and other highly important places. But, with the advent of technology, biometrics becomes a regular security process of our life nowadays. It also becomes more affordable and reliable technology.
Types of biometrics
All biometric modalities are basically two types; physiological and behavioral. Physiological biometrics are including fingerprint, iris, face, palm vein recognition. Behavioral biometrics are including signature and voice recognition.
However, the known types of biometrics are following:
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Fingerprint recognition
Fingerprint recognition technology has been done by taking a photograph of an individual’s fingertips and record the characteristics including whorls, arches, and loops of the fingertip.
It also captures the patterns of ridges, furrows, and minutiae for accurate analysis.
The process can be done in three ways:
- Minutae based
- Correlation based
- Ridge feature based
The fingerprint is a very secured, reliable and stable biometric solution. Law enforcement agencies have been using this technology for decades to identify criminals. Currently, this technology is becoming popular in household security, banking, workforce management etc.
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Iris recognition
Many recognize Iris recognition as the best biometric technology for identification. It analyzes the iris characteristics including rings, furrows, freckles that is situated in the colored tissue around the pupil. The iris scanner that contains a video camera and works through glasses and contact lenses.
Generally, iris recognition can be done by two methods:
- Daugman System and
- Wildes System
Iris recognition is deployed by many countries in crucial places like border crossings, banking, private companies, institutes, law enforcement agencies etc.
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Face recognition
Face recognition technique records face images through a digital video camera and analyses facial characteristics like the distance between eyes, nose, mouth, and jaw edges. These measurements are broken into facial planes and retained in a database, further used for comparison.
Then, the system creates a template on the database for that person to compare the data for further uses.
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Retina recognition
Retina recognition is a biometric modality that uses infrared technology to capture the unique patterns of an individual’s retina blood vessels. As an internal organ of the eye and protected from external environments, retina recognition is recognized as a reliable biometric authentication system.
5 Differences Between Iris Recognition And Retina Scanning Technology
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Hand geometry
Hand geometry recognition works with the shape of a person’s hand characteristics. The hand geometry reader measures an individual’s hand in several dimensions. Then, it stores the data for further comparison and measurement.
It is mostly popular for its comfort, easiness, and public acceptance. Nevertheless, this system isn’t very unique as like face or fingerprint recognition.
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Voice/speech recognition
Voice/speech recognition is a combination of physiological and behavioral biometrics. It works with speech patterns that capture by speech processing technology. This system analyzes the fundamental frequency, nasal tone, cadence, inflection, etc. to recognize a person’s speech.
It is also known as “automatic speech recognition” (ASR), “computer speech recognition”, “speech to text” (STT) etc.
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Palm vein recognition:
Pam vein recognition is one of the physiological types of biometrics that analyzes the unique patterns of the vein in the palms of an individual’s hand.
As like other biometric technology, at first it captures an image of the individual’s palm, then analyze and process the vein data and store it for further comparison.
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Signature recognition:
Signature recognition is one of the behavior types of biometrics. It works in two ways, static and dynamic. In this recognition system, the way an individual signs his name is counted as the characteristic of that person. It is based on metrics like number of interior contours and number of vertical slope components.
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Handwritten biometric recognition:
Handwritten biometric recognition is close to signature recognition and undoubtedly a behavior type of biometrics. It is a system of recognizing a person by his handwriting procedure. As like signature recognition it can also be categorized in two parts, static and dynamic.
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DNA Recognition
DNA biometric is quite different from standard biometric modalities. It requires tangible physical sample and couldn’t be done in real time. It is a recognition technology with very high accuracy.
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Ear Biometrics
Ear biometrics is one of the most accurate types of biometrics to authenticate a person. Some believe that it provides more accurate result than fingerprint and will be the future of biometrics.
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Gait Recognition:
Gait recognition is a biometric technology method that analyzes an individual by how the way they walk like saunter, swagger, sashay etc. This technology is highly suitable for surveillance analysis.
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Odour Recognition:
A quite strange biometric method compare to fingerprint or face recognition system. It works with the body odor of an individual for verification and identification.
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Typing/ keystroke recognition:
Typing or keystroke recognition is one of the behavioral types of biometrics. It analyzes the way a person press the keys to type something. The keystroke dynamics uses the data of the manner and the rhythm an individual types on a keyboard.
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Finger Vein recognition
Finger vein recognition is a method of biometric identification that works with the patterns of finger vein underneath the skin’s surface. It matches with the vascular pattern of an individual’s finger to previously acquired data.
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Eye vein recognition
Eye vein recognition is a type of biometric method that helps pattern-recognition techniques to video images of the veins of an individual’s eye. The veins are complex and unique that makes it one of the most accurate biometric authentication systems.
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Skin Reflection
Skin reflection biometric is quite uncommon biometric modality. In this system, several LEDs send light at various wavelengths into the human skin and photodiodes read the scattered light that is analyzed to perform the authentication.
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Lip motion
Lip motion technology analyzes a person’s lip motions and creates a password according to the activity. Then it verifies the data with previously stored data with new lip motion data.
Compare to other biometric modalities lip motion technology is quite a new modality. Professor Cheung Yiu-ming of Hong Kong Baptist University invents lip motion technology and patented in the US in 2015.
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Brain Wave Pattern
Brainwave recognition is a unique and surprising biometric modality. It measures the signals given by the brain to create a unique individual feature set on the database. Some researchers believe that it is a hundred percent accurate biometric identification process.
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Footprint and Foot Dynamics
As like fingerprint, finger vein, palm vein, iris and retina recognition, footprint can also be a unique physiological type of biometric identification. It is relatively new biometric identification system compares to other modalities.
This system captures the footprint based biometric identification characteristics of an individual. Then stored the data in a database for further comparison to verify the person.
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Thermography Recognition:
Facial thermography uses Infrared cameras to capture the flow of blood beneath the skin of an individual. Then, the underlying pattern generates a robust biometric characteristic for positive identification.
This technology can be used to test “liveness” of an individual.
These are the common types of biometrics available right now. As researchers are working hard to find more and more accurate biometric modalities to make this system more comfortable for the users, we are going to get a lot more solutions in coming future.
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