Biometrics: Human Identification Applications and Challenges

Creed Jones

May 26, 2006

Abstract

Human identification through the use of biometrics technologies is a very active area motivated by the needs of security. Several key techologies such as face, iris and fingerprint recognition are reaching very high levels of performance. However, there are a number of fundamental challenges: the need for secure and reliable distributed architectures, the mandate to preserve privacy and individual rights , and the constraints of ethics and social mores. Current research and development areas address these challenges. Open standards are now appearing that allow for robust system designs. Increased recognition accuracies are reducing the rate of false identifications and increasing public acceptance. This seminar will present an overview of the current biometrics industry and technology, will describe several current implementations in the US and abroad, and will review two key areas of current research interest: face recognition and fingerprint capture.

Speaker Bio

Creed Jones received the BS and MS in Electrical Engineering from Oakland University in 1980 and 1982 respectively. He has worked in the machine vision and image processing industry for 18 years, most notably at Perceptics Corporation and Optimas. He was instrumental in the development of the first practical automated license plate reading system, which is still in use for border management by the US and Canada. He entered the biometrics industry in 1998, as part of the staff of Sagem Morpho Inc. In 2000, Creed resumed his studies at Virginia Tech and completed the PhD in Computer Engineering in 2005. Since 2003, he has been Associate Professor of Computer Science at Seattle Pacific University. In addition, he is an independent consultant in the biometrics industry. Creed is the chair of the ANSI/INCITS M1.3 subcommittee on biometric data format standardization, as well as the project editor of the US national (INCITS 378) and international (ISO/IEC 19794-2) standards for finger minutiae data. Creed has authored several published papers and articles and is the holder of three US patents.

LM Seminar Series
Fundamentals of Networking Lab

For further information on the series, contact pam@ee.washington.edu.