Biometrics is a rapidly evolving field with applications ranging from accessing one’s computer to gaining entry into a country. The deployment of large-scale biometric systems in both commercial and government applications has increased public awareness of this technology. Recent years have seen significant growth in biometric research resulting in the development of innovative sensors, new algorithms, enhanced test methodologies and novel applications. This book addresses this void by inviting some of the prominent researchers in Biometrics to contribute chapters describing the fundamentals as well as the latest innovations in their respective areas of expertise.

Discover how to make biometrics -- the technology involving scanning and analyzing unique body characteristics and matching them against information stored in a database -- a part of your overall security plan with this hands-on guide. Includes deployment scenarios, cost analysis, privacy issues, and much more.

Biometric recognition, or simply biometrics, is the science of establishing the identity of a person based on physical or behavioral attributes. It is a rapidly evolving field with applications ranging from securely accessing one’s computer to gaining entry into a country. While the deployment of large-scale biometric systems in both commercial and government applications has increased the public awareness of this technology, "Introduction to Biometrics" is the first textbook to introduce the fundamentals of Biometrics to undergraduate/graduate students. The three commonly used modalities in the biometrics field, namely, fingerprint, face, and iris are covered in detail in this book. Few other modalities like hand geometry, ear, and gait are also discussed briefly along with advanced topics such as multibiometric systems and security of biometric systems. Exercises for each chapter will be available on the book website to help students gain a better understanding of the topics and obtain practical experience in designing computer programs for biometric applications. These can be found at: http://www.csee.wvu.edu/~ross/BiometricsTextBook/. Designed for undergraduate and graduate students in computer science and electrical engineering, "Introduction to Biometrics" is also suitable for researchers and biometric and computer security professionals.

The book highlights recent developments in human biometrics, covering a wide range of methods based on biological signals, image processing, and measurements of human characteristics such as fingerprints and iris or medical characteristics. Human Biometrics is becoming increasingly crucial in forensics security and medicine. They provide a solid basis for identifying individuals based on unique physical characteristics or diseases based on characteristic biomedical measurements. As such, the book offers an essential reference guide about biometry methods for students, engineers, designers, and technicians.

Starting with fingerprints more than a hundred years ago, there has been ongoing research in biometrics. Within the last forty years face and speaker recognition have emerged as research topics. However, as recently as a decade ago, biometrics itself did not exist as an independent field. Each of the biometric-related topics grew out of different disciplines. For example, the study of fingerprints came from forensics and pattern recognition, speaker recognition evolved from signal processing, the beginnings of face recognition were in computer vision, and privacy concerns arose from the public policy arena. One of the challenges of any new field is to state what the core ideas are that define the field in order to provide a research agenda for the field and identify key research problems. Biometrics has been grappling with this challenge since the late 1990s. With the matu ration of biometrics, the separate biometrics areas are coalescing into the new discipline of biometrics. The establishment of biometrics as a recognized field of inquiry allows the research community to identify problems that are common to biometrics in general. It is this identification of common problems that will define biometrics as a field and allow for broad advancement.

Biometric Systems provides practitioners with an overview of the principles and methods needed to build reliable biometric systems. It covers three main topics: key biometric technologies, design and management issues, and the performance evaluation of biometric systems for personal verification/identification. The four most widely used technologies are focused on - speech, fingerprint, iris and face recognition. Key features include: in-depth coverage of the technical and practical obstacles which are often neglected by application developers and system integrators and which result in shortfalls between expected and actual performance; and protocols and benchmarks which will allow developers to compare performance and track system improvements.

This book showcases the technologies and algorithms being used for human authentication and recognition. Examining the full range of biometrics solutions, including unimodal and multimodal biometrics, the book covers conventional biometric techniques as well as novel systems developed over the past few years. It includes coverage of new biometric algorithms with novel feature extraction techniques, new computer vision approaches, soft computing approaches, and machine learning techniques under a unified framework used in biometrics systems. The text includes model question papers, mathematical notations, and exercises to reinforce understanding.