Summary

With the rapid advances in the ability to capture and process biometric identifiers, along with overall improvements in technology, we now see that the business world has embraced biometrics as a people-centric solution to authentication. In this chapter, we took a look at what makes a good biometric identifier as we examined some of the desired qualities, such as robustness, its unchanging nature over time, its collectability, and the need to prevent circumvention. We examined the general operation of biometric technology, from initiating contact with the system, to acquiring the image and preparing it for comparison, and then determining whether there is a match and presenting the results.

We evaluated how you may encounter different environments when dealing with biometric authentication, including whether the system is attended or non-attended, public or private, and whether or not the system will use standards for data collection, compression, and format, or internally...