In
today's information age it is not difficult to collect data about an individual
and use that information to exercise control over the individual. Individuals
generally do not want others to have personal information about them unless they
decide to reveal it. With the rapid development of technology, it is more difficult
to maintain the levels of privacy citizens knew in the past. In this context,
data security has become an inevitable feature. Conventional methods of identification
based on possession of ID cards or exclusive knowledge like social security number
or a password are not altogether reliable. ID cards can be almost lost, forged
or misplaced: passwords can be forgotten.
Such that an unauthorized user may be able to break into an account with little
effort. So it is need to ensure denial of access to classified data by unauthorized
persons. Biometric technology has now become a viable alternative to traditional
identification systems because of its tremendous accuracy and speed. Biometric
system automatically verifies or recognizes the identity of a living person based
on physiological or behavioral characteristics.
Since
the persons to be identified should be physically present at the point of identification,
biometric techniques gives high security for the sensitive information stored
in mainframes or to avoid fraudulent use of ATMs. This paper explores the concept
of Iris recognition which is one of the most popular biometric techniques. This
technology finds applications in diverse fields.
Biometrics
- Future Of Identity Biometric dates back to ancient Egyptians who measured
people to identify them. Biometric devices have three primary components. 1.
Automated mechanism that scans and captures a digital or analog image of a living
personal characteristic 2. Compression, processing, storage and comparison
of image with a stored data. 3. Interfaces with application systems.
A
biometric system can be divided into two stages: the enrolment module and the
identification module. The enrolment module is responsible for training the system
to identity a given person. During an enrolment stage, a biometric sensor scans
the person's physiognomy to create a digital representation. A feature extractor
processes the representation to generate a more compact and expressive representation
called a template. For an iris image these include the various visible characteristics
of the iris such as contraction, Furrows, pits, rings etc. The template for each
user is stored in a biometric system database.
The
identification module is responsible for recognizing the person. During the identification
stage, the biometric sensor captures the characteristics of the person to be identified
and converts it into the same digital format as the template. The resulting template
is fed to the feature matcher, which compares it against the stored template to
determine whether the two templates match.
The identification can be in the form of verification, authenticating a claimed
identity or recognition, determining the identity of a person from a database
of known persons. In a verification system, when the captured characteristic and
the stored template of the claimed identity are the same, the system concludes
that the claimed identity is correct. In a recognition system, when the captured
characteristic and one of the stored templates are the same, the system identifies
the person with matching template.
