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A companion paper prepared in November 2005 provides an overview of  biometrics, related standards, uses and concerns. This paper provides a background to fingerprint recognition, describes the biometric use of fingerprints, biometric standards and related security issues. It is one of a series of papers also covering iris and retinal scanning, facial recognition as well as several other biometric technologies.

This handbook provides an overview of the user-centered design process and examples of how the process can be applied to the design and development of biometric technology systems.

The research described in this report was conducted by RAND Public Safety and
Justice for the Virginia State Crime Commission.

This briefing begins by defining biometrics and discussing examples of the technology. It then explains how biometrics may be used for authentication and surveillance purposes. Facial recognition is examined in depth, to include technical, operational, and testing considerations. This briefing concludes with a discussion of the legal status quo with respect to public sector use of facial recognition.

This set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) was developed by the National Science & Technology Council’s (NSTC) Subcommittee on Biometrics with the full understanding that national (INCITS/M1) and international (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC37) standards bodies are working to develop standard references. The subcommittee will review this set of FAQs for consistency as standards are passed. The subcommittee recognizes the impact of ongoing challenge problems, technical evaluations, and technology advancements. The FAQs will be updated accordingly
to reflect these changes. The statements herein are intended to further the understanding of a general audience and are not intended to replace or compete with sources that may be more technically descriptive/prescriptive.

The field trial was conducted over six months at two visa offices abroad, at two land ports of entry, at one airport, and at one refugee intake centre. All temporary resident visa applicants who appeared at those sites during the field trial were required to submit photos and fingerprints. Photos were collected at the visa offices, and fingerprints were collected at the point of first contact with the client—either the visa office or the port of entry.

Algorithms developed by the author for recognizing persons by their iris patterns have now been tested in six field and laboratory trials, producing no false matches in several million comparison tests. The recognition principle is the failure of a test of statistical independence on iris phase structure encoded by multi-scale quadrature wavelets. The combinatorial complexity of this phase information across different persons spans about 249 degrees of freedom and generates a discrimination entropy of about 3.2 bits/mm2 over the iris, enabling real-time decisions about personal identity with extremely high confidence. The high confidence levels are important because they allow very large databases to be searched exhaustively (one-to-many identification mode) without making false matches, despite so many chances. Biometrics that lack this property can only survive one-to-one (verification) or few comparisons. This paper explains the iris recognition algorithms, and presents results of 9.1 million comparisons among eye images from trials in Britain, the USA, Japan, and Korea.