Recent Advancements in Biometrics: Vein and Fingerprint Authentication

Abstract

Biometric signatures, or biometrics, are used to identify individuals by measuring certain unique physicaland behavioral characteristics. Individuals must be identified to allow or prohibit access to secure areas—or to enablethem to use personal digital devices such as, computer, personal digital assistant (PDA), or mobile phone. Virtually all biometric methods are implemented using the following 1) sensor, to acquire raw biometric data from an individual; 2) feature extraction, to process the acquired data to develop a feature-set that represents the biometric trait; 3) pattern matching, to compare the extracted feature-set against stored templates residing in a database; and 4) decisionmaking, whereby a user’s claimed identity is authenticated or rejected. In this paper, a compact system that consists of a CMOS fingerprint sensor (FPC1011F1) is used with the FPC2020 power efficient fingerprint processor ; which acts as a biometric sub-system with a direct interface to the sensor as well as to an external flash memory for storing finger print templates. Distinct Area Detection (DAD) algorithm; which is a feature based algorithm is used by the fingerprint processor, which offer improvements in performance. Vein authentication is another recent advancement in biometrics. Vein biometrics is discussed and comparison with other biometrics is revealed.