COMPONENTS OF BIOMETRIC SYSTEM

The word ‘Biometric’ is a composite of two parts: the Greek words ‘bios’ (life) and ‘metron’ (measure). Biometric is sometimes defined as a research area focused on measuring and analyzing a person’s unique characteristics. Biometric systems are becoming increasingly popular due to some factors including increased need for reliable and convenient authentication, decreased costs and increased government and industry adoption. With biometric based authentication, there is nothing to lose or forget unlike with physical tokens (keys, cards) or information tokens (PIN, code) in traditional security authentication systems. In addition, the cost of biometric systems was brought down to an affordable range at the commercial market exhibits continuous improvement in the hardware and software technologies and accessibility. Due to these advantages, numerous public and private organizations are using biometric systems as main security systems for access control based on person authentication.

  A biometric system can be used for person verification or person identification. Person verification answers the question, “Am I who I claim to be?” and then confirms the validity of a claimed identity by comparing a verification template to an enrollment template. Verification thus needs a person to provide his identity in order for it to be verified. Thus, the comparison needed for verification is called one-to-one comparison. During verification, usually some knowledge about the identity (such as ID) is given to the system along with the biometric identifier. This additional factor uniquely presents an enrolled identity and extracted biometric features to the system database. Verification is used in everyday life at such circumstances as banking, using credit card, attending events, taking exams and so on. Usually, a person’s identity is verified by the means of comparing his facial biometrics and/or signature to the data stored on his passport, ID or credit card. Sometimes, more than one source of information is used for such verification.