Biometrics: techniques for personal identification

Personal identification is to associate a particular individual with an identity. It plays a critical role in our society, in which questions related to the identity of individuals such as Is this the person who he or she claims to be?, Has this applicant been here before?, Should this individual be given access to our system?, etc. are asked millions of times every day by hundreds of thousands of organizations in financial services, health care, electronic commerce, telecommunication, government, etc. With the rapid evolution of information technology, people are becoming even more and more electronically connected. As a result, the ability to achieve highly accurate automatic personal identification is becoming more critical. Biometrics, which refers to identifying an individual based on her physiological or behavioral characteristics (biometric identifiers), 1,2 relies on something which you are or you do to make a positive personal identification. It is inherently more reliable and more capable than knowledge-based and token-based techniques in differentiating between an authorized person and a fraudulent impostor, because the physiological or behavioral characteristics are unique to every person. Biometrics provides a solution for the security requirements of our electronically inter-connected information society.