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Fujitsu Launches New Biometric Device
Fujitsu announced today that it was releasing a device to measure identity by means of reading veins in the palms of users. This whole area looks ripe for cost control, as there are a lot of different biometric systems out there. How about a quick tour?
There are way too many projects to do full coverage here. After 9-11, if you can imagine it, somebody probably has a pet project for biometric identification/verification.
The big ones are:
Fingerprint Identification: The grand-daddy of biometrics. Many types of scanners and readers are out there, and the technology has matured. IBM, notably, has a notebook computer that integrates fingerprint logon, as do many other vendors.
Hand Geometry: This is one of my favorites. You place your entire hand in the reader, which takes a "handprint" For some reason this just feels neat to do. It's also an older technology.
Face Location: This is the cool kid on the block. This is taking a photograph (or live picture) and having the computer extract faces. Then match the faces against faces on file. There's been a lot of anecdotal information both ways on this. My feeling is the technology isn't ready for prime time yet, but I may be ill-informed.
Eye Scanning: This was the hot biometric device we all saw in the movies over the last decade. The person looks into a device, which reads patterns in the retina.
Voice verification: This is not speech recognition, where the computer tries to figure out what you are saying. Instead, it analyzes unique speech characteristics, such as the frequency between phonetics.
Signature: Reading your signature.
DNA: The ultimate in identification. Probably the most reliable, but also the most time-consuming and expensive.
Keystroke dynamics: Turns out we all type on the keyboard a little differently. For some time, programs have been able to write code to "read" the patterns people use at the keyboard and identify them.
Multibiometrics: This is combining multiple readings. If you ask me, I would want a future in which there are three biometric systems working concurrently to identify you. Perhaps a face scan, combined with a handprint reader and a face-vein reader (or retinal scanner)
No matter what technology you choose, biometrics is going to be part of most software (and real-world) construction projects in the future. Keeping an eye on the technology, pros and cons, is the best way to avoid expensive lessons down the road.
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