OSS Nokalva BioFoundry® - Biometrics

What is Biometrics?

Biometrics is an open-ended set of technologies based on the measurement of some physical characteristics of human beings for the purpose of identifying an individual or verifying identity. A vast range of such technologies have been developed during the past years and they include: fingerprint recognition, iris scanning, retina scanning, voice recognition, facial image and many others.

Among the many possible applications of biometrics, are:
- controlling physical access to buildings or secured areas;
- controlling logical access to systems, resources and services;
- surveillance.

Many proprietary biometrics products have been in use for years and many are still being deployed. However, as the biometrics industry is reaching maturity, the user community is strongly calling for standards. Many users, both in the private and governmental sectors of many countries, are realizing that standards are necessary to ensure product quality and protection of investments and to limit costs, especially in large-scale, complex installations. Users and system integrators are increasingly aware that the emergence of standard-based products will allow them to build better systems at a lower cost, thanks to a greater flexibility in selecting products and mixing and matching them according to the users' specific needs.

Several standard initiatives in the area of biometrics are being pursued within various standard organizations and consortia. These initiatives cover many aspects of the use of biometrics, some of which are specific to a single biometric technology, while some are more general and lay a foundation on which complex system architectures can be built by integrating biometrics products made by different vendors.

Vendors will benefit from standards as much as users, for much less effort will be needed to complete the development of a biometrics product, due to many details of the design being driven by the standard specifications. Smaller companies will be able to concentrate on creating very good biometric software components - perhaps as drivers for their own hardware devices - without being concerned with building a complete biometric solution if they don't view this as a business opportunity. Other companies may choose to provide powerful user applications based on biometrics without being involved with specific biometric technologies. On the other hand, companies willing to provide complete solutions will also benefit both in terms of lower cost of design, development and testing, and from a marketing perspective.