biometrics
Biometrics is the science of measuring living bodies. Based on biometrics, special security procedures for the verification and identification of persons have been developed for communications technology and information technology. The procedures are based on the recognition of biometric features and are tangential to all bodily and physiological characteristics.
Physiological features include the iris and retina, fingerprint, palm veins and facial recognition, hand geometry and ear shape, odor, and blood count. In addition to the aforementioned body static features, there are also movement features and behavioral features. These dynamic features include signature dynamics, typing behavior, voice recognition, lip movement, and gait recognition.
However, only the data that uniquely and unequivocally identifies a human being and that cannot be simulated or altered are of interest for security concepts. These include fingerprints, hand geometry and finger geometry, voiceprints, facial dimensions, iris and retina.
In biometric systems, the body's own characteristics of individuals are recorded and stored. For security-relevant tasks such as access authorization and authentication, the features are recorded and compared with the stored features by means of image comparison. Only if there is a match is the access request granted.
Biometric identification methods rely on the measurement of physical characteristics, in particular fingerprints, iris recognition and retina recognition or facial recognition. The data can be stored on a smart card, for example. Corresponding systems are called fingerprint scanners or fingerprint scanning, facial image scanning or iris recognition.
Since biometric data can neither be altered nor passed on to other persons, this provides an extremely high level of protection against forgery. Identification with biometric procedures is based on probabilities. These are determined by the three parameters false acceptance rate( FAR), false rejection rate( FRR) and equal error rate( EER).
Biometric features, like other identification methods, are part of Automatic Identification and Data Capture( AIDC).