Customer Reviews

Guide to Biometrics (Springer Professional Computing)

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This book is a general textbook on biometric fundamentals as opposed to discussions on specific biometric measurements - fingerprint, iris, face recognition etc. Rather than just chatter on endlessly like an academic journal, the author keeps things interesting with numerical insights and practical suggestions. The book is divided into four parts.

Part one serves as an introduction and is only sixty pages long. Chapters 1 and 2 acquaint the reader with biometric terminology. For example, the authors explain the difference between verification, identification, screening, and continuity of identity systems. They also explain how biometric matching is fundamentally different from password matching in computer security. You can make a password so complex and long that it is very difficult to crack - and difficult to use. Alternatively, the strength of a biometric system is limited by the information content of the biometric characteristic - you cannot make it arbitrarily more complex. Nature limits you. In Chapters 3 and 4, the basic concepts are introduced underlying common biometric systems such as fingerprint, face, speaker, iris, hand geometry, and signature recognition systems. Emerging biometric systems such as those that use DNA, retina, thermograms, gait, keystroke, ear, skin reflectance, lip motion, and body odor for recognition are also mentioned. This is all a very brief and shallow treatment.

Part two talks about the mathematics needed to perform biometric matching. The various system errors that can occur are addressed in chapters 5 and 6. Chapter 6 enhances the reader's understanding of biometric identification, which is a much harder problem than verification. Chapter 7 points out that the best strategy to evaluate biometric systems is to organize competitions among biometric systems and conduct comparative evaluations on a common database and testing protocol. In Chapter 8, the authors provide guidelines on how to select a suitable biometric for various applications. The advantages and disadvantages of each biometric technology is discussed and some of the prevalent myths are debunked.

Part three deals with system issues associated with implementing biometric systems. Chapter 9 discusses enrollment issues when creating and maintaining a database. Many system level issues arise when the database size is very large. In case of certain biometric applications, such as national identification card or driver's license, the database could contain tens of millions of identities and hundreds of millions of biometric samples. In Chapter 10, the authors walk the readers through large-scale system issues. Decision and score level fusions are discussed in Chapter 11 for verification and identification systems. Common design techniques used to secure biometric systems are discussed in Chapter 12, and standards for APIs and databases, certifications and legislation are the topics of Chapter 13.

Part four covers advanced topics. In Chapter 14, the authors present how to estimate the individuality in iris and fingerprint biometrics. Chapter 15 deals with system errors and confidence intervals. In Chapter 16, the authors discuss how cost functions can be used to choose the operating point of a matcher. Finally, methods of estimating the cumulative match curve in identification systems and its relation to the false accept/reject rates are discussed. Chapter 17 is entirely about future trends in biometrics. Since this book was written in 2003, in many cases, the future is now and these trends are already being or have been implemented at least in part.

This book could have been better if some exercises had been included with each chapter. Particularly with all of the statistics and database theory floating around in this book, more practical examples and exercises would enhance student confidence in these areas. However, it is still a good book on the fundamentals of biometrics and the considerations that go into designing a system regardless of the biometric(s) chosen.