BIO-DISTANCE · BIOMETRICS AT A DISTANCE

Despite the practical importance and the advantages of biometric solutions to the task of verifying personal identity, their adoption has proved to be slower that predicted. The current market pull, mainly driven by the introduction of governmental applications, is still in its early stage. While technological aspects will still play an important role, demands for more consumer convenience will drive innovation in biometrics, with user-centered research actions focused on its transparent use, facilitating the ease of interaction with the system. Biometrics “on the move” is a hottest research topic aimed to acquire biometric data “at a distance” as a person walks by detection equipment. This drastically reduces the need of user’s cooperation, achieving low intrusiveness and thus, high acceptance and transparency. Its applications are very diverse, enhancing the customer experience where large number of people moves through a bottleneck (security checkpoints in airports, access control). It will also make a vast amount of surveillance cameras in non-cooperative or uncontrolled environments suitable for recognition purposes (e.g. placed in hallways or outdoors). The main objective of this proposal is to investigate a number of activities aimed to make biometric technologies applicable to data acquired at a distance and on the move. We propose the use of face and iris as the reference modalities, being the two traits that are attracting more efforts thanks to the possibility of their simultaneous acquisition. This aim is an important technological challenge, since the major limitation of current face and iris commercial systems is the degree of control and cooperation required during the acquisition. This project is an integrated approach that covers the whole structure of a biometric system, including basic research and algorithm development for the different stages of the system, as well as practical results through case studies implementation and evaluation.