Apple forges ahead with biometrics

NEWS It reports that the Center for Digital Democracy had asked for the presentations, pointing to those companies’ expertise and the need for stakeholders to better understand the technology as they try to come up with voluntary privacy guidelines to flesh out the US privacy Bill of Rights framework. Neither Google nor Facebook were under any obligation to present or participate. This comes as researchers revealed software that allows Facebook to enable facial recognition that is described as on a par with human recognition levels. Facebook noted the findings on the publications area of its website https://www. facebook.com/publications/546316888800776/. Its researchers will present the paper ‘DeepFace: Closing the Gap to Human-Level Performance in Face Verification’ at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in June. They point out that in face recognition systems, the conventional pipeline consists of four stages: detect, align, represent and classify. They have revisited the alignment and the representation steps, employing explicit 3D face modelling in order to apply a piecewise affine transformation, and derive a face representation from a nine-layer deep neural network. This deep network involves more than 120m parameters using several locally connected layers without weight sharing, rather than the standard convolutional layers. Researchers trained the system on the largest facial dataset to date, an identity labelled dataset of four million facial images belonging to more than 4,000 identities, where each identity has an average of over a thousand samples. The method is reported to reach an accuracy of 97.25% on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) dataset, closely approaching humanlevel performance.

App to use facial recognition to spot medical conditions

A

n app will use facial recognition technology to spot facial changes that may flag medical conditions. Sharon Moalem, geneticist, has developed an app called Recognyz, reports Mobihealth News. “Many medical conditions and/or syndromes have specific physical features, such as interpupillary distance and skull shape, that are used by physicians or medical allied health workers as an aid in diagnoses,” Moalem’s patent filing says. “For example, increased distance between the eyes of an individual can be an indicator of a condition called Noonan syndrome.”

Aurora reveals LFWtopping face recognition

A

urora has revealed new face recognition technology, now rated as the most accurate system on LFW, the internationally established benchmark run by the University of Massachusetts. The algorithm is achieving a mean classification accuracy of 93.24%, placing it ahead of competitors including NEC, Vision Labs, Face.com, Oxford University, the University of Science and Technology China and Microsoft Research, reports Aurora. The LFW benchmark includes extremely difficult cases: adverse lighting conditions; bad head angles and great variations in image quality. A representative from Aurora says, “We are not talking about a minuscule improvement to an almost perfect system; the technology is demonstrating that it can recognise a category of image that was previously beyond our capabilities.” A summary of the results can be found on Aurora’s website (www.facerec.com/lfw.html). In addition, Aurora has launched a free early beta version of its cloud-based face recognition service. x See feature page 9.

mobile

Global mobile biometrics to see 156.9% growth over five years

T

he global mobile biometrics market is forecast to grow at a CAGR of 156.9% over the period 2013-18, according to TechNavio analysts. One of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the increasing use of personal devices for financial transactions. Technavio points out that the global mobile biometrics market has been witnessing an increasing number of mergers and acquisitions. However, the availability of inexpensive nonbiometrics technologies could pose a challenge to the growth of this market. TechNavio identifies the key vendors dominating this space as including 3M Cogent Inc, Fujitsu, and NEC.

Apple forges ahead with biometrics

A

pple is reported to be working on technology that use biometrics Continued on page 12...

EVENTS CALENDAR 29 April 2014 Brussels

2nd Identities at the Borders seminar This event will bring together border agencies and aviation industry professionals to discuss the future of travel. The event will focus on the Future of Travel (Registered Traveller Programmes) and Automated Border Control. Over 50 delegates attended the first seminar including: Copenhagen Airports, ACI Europe, Federal Police Belgium, Belgian Federal Police, Bundespolizei (BPOL) German Federal Police, Royal Netherlands Marechaussee (KMar) - Ministry of Defence, UK Home Office - UK Border Force, Norwegian ID Centre, IATA and KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. More information: http://www.biometricsinstitute. org/events.php/444/2nd-identities-at-the-bordersseminar

12-14 May 2014 Poly World Trade Centre, Guangzhou, China

Biometric China The exhibition will gather more than 200 brands from China, Germany, US, UK, Switzerland, South Korea, Israel, Japan and other countries and regions. More information: http://www.biometricchina.net/en/

20-22 May 2014 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Biometric Security Forum Asia Biometric Security Forum Asia will take place over three days and will include high-level speakers from Malaysia, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Europe. It will present and discuss key themes including biometric security issues and trends and solutions for the border industry. The event is holding a site visit to the lab of biometrics centre of the Kuala Lumpur International Airport and will offer a platform for business negotiations between both manufacturers and industry end users. More information: http://www.ib-consultancy.com/ events/event/56-biometric-security-forum-asia-2014.html

28-29 May 2014 Sydney, Australia

Biometrics Institute Asia-Pacific Conference 2014 Formerly known as The Biometrics Institute Australia Conference & Exhibition, the Asia Pacific Conference 2014 will be held at Dockside, Sydney. The conference will provide an insight into the latest developments and best practice examples of biometric technologies. More information: http://www.biometricsinstitute.org/events.php/461/ asia-pacific-conference-2014

10-13 June 2014 Istanbul, Turkey

Border Management and Technologies Summit Border management is becoming a priority in the Balkans and Middle East where governments in the region are looking to invest in securing their international borders. Recent increased pressure to limit refugees and migrants entering Western Europe means governments are reacting by investing in border security. The 2014 event will provide in-depth presentations from the Balkans region, Middle East and Central Asia. More information: http://www.intelligence-sec. com/events/border-management-technologiessummit-2014

3 April 2014

Biometric Technology Today

NEWS/COMMENT ...Continued from page 3 including retinal scanning and facial recognition to secure communications within devices in the future. More imminently, it is also said to be preparing a software update to refine the reliability of its Touch ID fingerprint recognition system, according to an AppleInsider report. Some iPhone 5S owners have reported diminishing Touch ID reliability since they first scanned their fingerprints. Rescanning fingerprints seems to help, but then reliability declines again. PatentlyApple reports that in March the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple titled ‘Wireless Pairing and Communication between Devices Using Biometric Data’. The patent reveals that information exchanged between devices such as an iPhone and Mac may one day use biometrics such as retinal scanning, facial recognition and more to perform a connection, such as a Bluetooth link, between the devices.

VoiceVault unveils ViGo voice biometrics for mobile

V

oiceVault has announced the release of ViGo a voice biometric platform designed for mobile. ViGo provides a ecosystem for developing and deploying voice biometrics in a mobile app. ViGo offers phrase or digit-based voice registration and is based on a rapid application development platform for Android or iOS. “Because hundreds of millions of people use their smartphones or tablets for both business and personal applications, there is very large demand for strong but simple log-on or activation,” says Dan Miller, senior analyst at Opus Research. “Voice-based authentication fills that bill, and VoiceVault’s ViGo puts it right on every mobile app developer's design palette.” Alongside the ViGo release, VoiceVault has launched a website with additional resources specifically for app developers

r&d

NIST publishes compression guidance for fingerprint

T

he NIST Friction Ridge Compression Study team has published ‘NIST Special Publication 500-289 Compression Guidance for 1000 ppi Friction Ridge Imagery’. 12

Biometric Technology Today

SP500-289 has been developed in partnership with the US FBI and provides guidance for the compression of 1000ppi friction ridge imagery including latent fingerprints using the JPEG 2000 compression algorithm. Additionally, SP500-289 provides guidance for downsampling of friction ridge images from 1000ppi to 500ppi, providing a pathway for interoperability with 500ppi systems. NIST Special Publication 500289 Final is a culmination of six separate studies, which began in 2009.

ImageWare Systems and T-Systems pilot integration of products

I

mageWare Systems has begun a testing phase with T-Systems, a

subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom, to integrate ImageWare Systems’ multimodal biometric, cloud-based identity management and credential technology into T-Systems’ products. ImageWare Systems and T-Systems have been discussing business ideas during the past few months. T-Systems has started a pilot in its labs in Germany to integrate its products with ImageWare’s GoMobile Interactive biometrically secured user authentication solution for mobile devices; its Biometric Engine (BE), a real-time, cloud-enabled multimodal biometric database; and GoCloudID, a cloud-based SaaS ID management platform. A major focus is to create solutions for cloud products and data storage for business customers.

COMMENT When does technological advancement become scope creep? This question seems very pertinent just now. The issue tends to raise its head where implementations of biometric technology are most sensitive and privacy considerations are acute. In India, biometric data has been collected on an industrial scale by the Aadhaar programme, which provided each citizen with a unique identity number linked to the biometrics of the person. The programme is described as voluntary and indeed the Supreme Court ruled last year that the Aadhaar card was not to be used as a necessity for public services. Yet as it provides the means for citizens to access public services and finance, for many people participation in Aadhaar is inescapable. More recently the Supreme Court has asked the government for an explanation as to why the Aadhaar card was still being considered mandatory for Indian citizens who wished to get property or marriages registered, or in signing up for a gas connection, reports The Indian Republic. The Supreme Court has further clarified that the biometric data of the citizens that was collected under the Aadhaar system is not to be shared with anyone, following an instance when police in Goa had sought the information of those enrolled in the scheme for an unsolved case. Separately, in Bangalore, police authorities have combined biometric clocking in with law enforcement. The Hindu reports that Bangalore

city police has ‘introduced a biometric attendance system that would not only ensure punctuality among police personnel, but also keep a fool-proof check on anti-social elements’. Privacy sensors are set to high when it comes to collecting the biometric measurements of children in school. In Sydney, Australia, civil liberties bodies have raised concerns about scope creep around biometric systems in education. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that local schools scan fingerprints to record when students enter and leave school. Civil Liberties Australia chief executive officer Bill Rowlings called for schools and education authorities to put robust rules in place for how technology is used and administered, and the data safeguarded to prevent school for becoming ‘mini-surveillance states’. He told The Sydney Morning Herald, “A scan on arrival just tells you who passed through the school gates on the way in. The only way to ensure a child is at school all day is to fingerprint the student every half hour. So pretty soon children will be scanned into every classroom, every separate facility within the school grounds. If that is done, suddenly schools will become mini-surveillance states.” As it becomes increasingly possible to link progressively more accurate biometric data with other data – see page 1 for a news story covering an emerging technology combining fingerprint recognition with drugs and gender detection – the voices of the civil libertarians cannot be discounted and vendors, researchers and industry bodies might do well to work together on addressing scope creep. Tracey Caldwell

April 2014