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.
