A wide variety of systems requires reliable personal recognition schemes to either confirm or determine the identity of an individual requesting their services. The purpose of such schemes is to ensure that the rendered services are accessed only by a legitimate user and no one else. Examples of such applications include secure access to buildings, computer systems, laptops, cellular phones, and ATMs. In the absence of robust personal recognition schemes, these systems are vulnerable to the wiles of an impostor. Biometric recognition, or, simply, biometrics, refers to the automatic recognition of individuals based on their physiological and/or behavioral characteristics. By using biometrics, it is possible to confirm or establish an individual's identity based on "who she is", rather than by "what she possesses" (e.g., an ID card) or "what she remembers" (e.g., a password). We give a brief overview of the field of biometrics and summarize some of its advantages, disadvantages, strengths, limitations, and related privacy concerns.

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An introduction to biometric recognition

A major new professional reference work on fingerprint security systems and technology from leading international researchers in the field Handbook provides authoritative and comprehensive coverage of all major topics, concepts, and methods for fingerprint security systems This unique reference work is an absolutely essential resource for all biometric security professionals, researchers, and systems administrators

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Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition

Despite active research and significant progress in the last 30 years, eye detection and tracking remains challenging due to the individuality of eyes, occlusion, variability in scale, location, and light conditions. Data on eye location and details of eye movements have numerous applications and are essential in face detection, biometric identification, and particular human-computer interaction tasks. This paper reviews current progress and state of the art in video-based eye detection and tracking in order to identify promising techniques as well as issues to be further addressed. We present a detailed review of recent eye models and techniques for eye detection and tracking. We also survey methods for gaze estimation and compare them based on their geometric properties and reported accuracies. This review shows that, despite their apparent simplicity, the development of a general eye detection technique involves addressing many challenges, requires further theoretical developments, and is consequently of interest to many other domains problems in computer vision and beyond.

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In the Eye of the Beholder: A Survey of Models for Eyes and Gaze

An intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

Intelligent Automated Assistant

Biometric recognition offers a reliable solution to the problem of user authentication in identity management systems. With the widespread deployment of biometric systems in various applications, there are increasing concerns about the security and privacy of biometric technology. Public acceptance of biometrics technology will depend on the ability of system designers to demonstrate that these systems are robust, have low error rates, and are tamper proof. We present a high-level categorization of the various vulnerabilities of a biometric system and discuss countermeasures that have been proposed to address these vulnerabilities. In particular, we focus on biometric template security which is an important issue because, unlike passwords and tokens, compromised biometric templates cannot be revoked and reissued. Protecting the template is a challenging task due to intrauser variability in the acquired biometric traits. We present an overview of various biometric template protection schemes and discuss their advantages and limitations in terms of security, revocability, and impact on matching accuracy. A template protection scheme with provable security and acceptable recognition performance has thus far remained elusive. Development of such a scheme is crucial as biometric systems are beginning to proliferate into the core physical and information infrastructure of our society.

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Biometric template security

Reliable and accurate fingerprint recognition is a challenging pattern recognition problem, requiring algorithms robust in many contexts. FVC2000 competition attempted to establish the first common benchmark, allowing companies and academic institutions to unambiguously compare performance and track improvements in their fingerprint recognition algorithms. Three databases were created using different state-of-the-art sensors and a fourth database was artificially generated; 11 algorithms were extensively tested on the four data sets. We believe that FVC2000 protocol, databases, and results will be useful to all practitioners in the field not only as a benchmark for improving methods, but also for enabling an unbiased evaluation of algorithms.

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FVC2000: fingerprint verification competition

Two years after the first edition, a new Fingerprint Verification Competition (FVC2002) was organized by the authors, with the aim of determining the state-of-the-art in this challenging pattern recognition application. The experience and the feedback received from FVC2000 allowed the authors to improve the organization of FVC2002 and to capture the attention of a significantly higher number of academic and commercial organizations (33 algorithms were submitted). This paper discusses the FVC2002 database, the test protocol and the main differences between FVC2000 and FVC2002. The algorithm performance evaluation will be presented at the 16/sup th/ ICPR.

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FVC2002: Second Fingerprint Verification Competition

A new technology evaluation of fingerprint verification algorithms has been organized following the approach of the previous FVC2000 and FVC2002 evaluations, with the aim of tracking the quickly evolving state-of-the-art of fingerprint recognition systems. Three sensors have been used for data collection, including a solid state sweeping sensor, and two optical sensors of different characteristics. The competition included a new category dedicated to ”light” systems, characterized by limited computational and storage resources. This paper summarizes the main activities of the FVC2004 organization and provides a first overview of the evaluation. Results will be further elaborated and officially presented at the International Conference on Biometric Authentication (Hong Kong) on July 2004.

FVC2004: Third Fingerprint Verification Competition

The purpose of this document is to summarise the current understanding of the biometrics community of the best scientific practices for conducting technical performance testing towards the end of field performance estimation.

Best practices in testing and reporting performance of biometric devices.

This paper is concerned with the performance evaluation of fingerprint verification systems. After an initial classification of biometric testing initiatives, we explore both the theoretical and practical issues related to performance evaluation by presenting the outcome of the recent fingerprint verification competition (FVC2004). FVC2004 was organized by the authors of this work for the purpose of assessing the state-of-the-art in this challenging pattern recognition application and making available a new common benchmark for an unambiguous comparison of fingerprint-based biometric systems. FVC2004 is an independent, strongly supervised evaluation performed at the evaluators' site on evaluators' hardware. This allowed the test to be completely controlled and the computation times of different algorithms to be fairly compared. The experience and feedback received from previous, similar competitions (FVC2000 and FVC2002) allowed us to improve the organization and methodology of FVC2004 and to capture the attention of a significantly higher number of academic and commercial organizations (67 algorithms were submitted for FVC2004). A new, "light" competition category was included to estimate the loss of matching performance caused by imposing computational constraints. This paper discusses data collection and testing protocols, and includes a detailed analysis of the results. We introduce a simple but effective method for comparing algorithms at the score level, allowing us to isolate difficult cases (images) and to study error correlations and algorithm "fusion." The huge amount of information obtained, including a structured classification of the submitted algorithms on the basis of their features, makes it possible to better understand how current fingerprint recognition systems work and to delineate useful research directions for the future.

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James L. Wayman

Papers

FVC2000: fingerprint verification competition

FVC2002: Second Fingerprint Verification Competition

FVC2004: Third Fingerprint Verification Competition

Best practices in testing and reporting performance of biometric devices.

Performance evaluation of fingerprint verification systems