These days, there are many activities that we perform with the help of computers. We need to have a secure, simple and reliable system, but achieving it can be rather challenging for many people. Each day, transaction frauds and security breaches increase. The need for highly secure personal identification and verification is a huge concern for both individual users and organizations. It is necessary to have tools that can measure something unique about individuals.
The first attempt of biometric technique was performed in China. Chinese in 14th century already used a type of fingerprinting to identify specific people. They also stamp the footprints and palm of babies to distinguish them. Biometrics is derived from two Greek words, bio means life and metric means measurement. It is generally a study to recognize people uniquely based on their behavioural and physical traits. DNA is probably the most reliable form of biometric characteristic, but it could be rather complicated to perform in a field situation.
Through proper identification, it is possible for organizations to improve their security measures dramatically. There is a rapid increase on awareness of securities among professionals who want to protect their essential information. Today, information can be considered as the greatest asset that organizations have. Organizations seek to safeguard it, from either external or internal threats. It is clear that security plays an essential role in any organization and making our computer secure can be rather challenging.
Fortunately, there are various biometric techniques that can be used effectively to recognize the identity of users based on their physiological characteristics. With biometric techniques, it is possible for us to exploit unique behavioural and physical traits of a person. This is an important step to authenticate an individual. There are various physical features that can be used to verify people using biometric technology, such as fingerprints, face, retina, iris, hand geometry, voice and others. Authentication using biometric technique can be implemented in various industries, such as airport, stock exchanges, health products manufacturers, defense, retail, banking and others.
There are many attempts to make biometric technologies as highly secure personal identifications and verification solutions. New techniques are made to ensure we could get more robust solutions to different problems in the society. Current biometric techniques are usually focused on the behavioural and physical traits that can determine our personal identity. Biometric technology must be effective enough to verify the identity of an individual. We should check the identity of specific people based on the analysis and measurements of their unique behavioural and physical data.
Behavioral traits could also be considered as biometric characteristics. We could study the voice, keystroke and handwriting of a person. This, biometric system can be implemented on pattern recognition. These characteristics can be collected using sensors. These sensors should be able to help us acquire data needed for further identification and verification. The data can be converted into a kind of digital code. The quality of a sensor and equipment used to capture the data will always have a significant impact on the overall quality of the system.