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Australian Taxation Office adds voice authentication to its app
NEWS/COMMENT ...Continued from page 3 vendors. According to the report, banks and financial institutions are significant adopters of voice biometrics for customer verification purposes. Voice recognition is expected to gain greater traction in banking over the next few years, specifically for mobile banking, as it is affordable, user friendly, and does not require any hardware investment. The top four emerging trends for the global behavioural biometric market according to Technavio are: increasing adoption of multimodal biometrics implementation of voice biometrics in the healthcare sector, adoption of voice biometrics in the BFSI sector and signature verification on smartphones. Separately Research and Markets forecasts the global behavioural biometric market to grow at a CAGR of 17.34% during the period 2016-2020.
This agreement enables Google to deploy its advanced neural computation engine on Movidius ultra-low-power platform, introducing a new way for machine intelligence to run locally on devices. Local computation allows for data to stay on device and function without internet connection and with fewer latency issues. This means that in future small mobile products could have the builtin ability to understand and recognise images and audio quickly and accurately.
government
Australian Taxation Office adds voice authentication to its app
T
HE !USTRALIAN 4AXATION /FFICE !4/ HAS FURTHER EXPANDED ITS
voice authentication programme by integrating Nuance’s voice biometrics technology into its mobile app. Taxpayers can already authenticate using their voice when calling the ATO contact centre. This second phase implementation now offers taxpayers voice biometric authentication across its suite of online services, accessible through the ATO app. The ATO receives approximately 7.2m calls per year and prior to implementing Nuance’s voice biometrics around 76% of these calls required an ATO agent to verify the caller’s identity, at a cost of 75,000 hours of agents’ and customers’ time each year. “The ATO is committed to delivering a contemporary digital experience for our clients and feedback has shown an overwhelming acceptance of voice biometrics in the call center, making it a natural next step to bring this ease of access to the mobile app,” says assistant commissioner, ATO John Dardo.
r&D
lexEnable and Isorg develop large area flexible fingerprint sensor
l
exEnable and Isorg have developed what they claim to be the world’s first large area flexible fingerprint sensor on plastic designed for biometric applications, reports EE Times. With an active area of 86x86mm, a 84μm pitch (78μm pixel size with 6μm spacing) and a 1048576 pixel resolution (1024x1024), the flexible sensor is only 0.3mm thick and can operate in visible and near infra-red up to wavelengths of 900nm. The technology is capable of measuring not only the fingerprint, but also the configuration of veins in the fingers. The large labelthin sensing area can be applied to almost any surface from steering wheel to credit card.
Google works with Movidius to deploy advanced machine intelligence on mobiles
G
oogle is working with Movidius to accelerate the adoption of deep learning within mobile devices. Google will source Movidius processors alongside the Movidius software development environment while contributing to Movidius’ neural network technology roadmap.
12
Biometric Technology Today
COMMENT In the UK the House of Lords has reopened the debate on introducing a biometric ID card for citizens. Lord CampbellSavours argued that a ‘national identity card with relevant biometric data would be a powerful tool in ensuring that people pay the state for the services they receive’. He pointed out that under the Government’s identity assurance programme, IDAP, people assert their identities to government via a series of private sector identity provider. In Campbell-Savours’ view, “Although they LÕ`ÊÀi>ÌÃ «ÃÊÜÌ Ê , ]Ê*9 ]ÊÌ iÊ DVLA and other departments or agencies, they lack access to the necessary biometric data such as fingerprints, digital iris recognition and facial digital photographs. Their programmes are undermined . . . by the lack of a national identity register to underpin the process of identity assurance.” This comes as Scottish authorities are navigating a route through the privacy implications of using biometric technology in law enforcement. Herald Scotland reports that Scottish football officials have been criticised for seeking government support to introduce facial recognition technology to help fight offensive behaviour in stadiums. Meanwhile Scottish Police have issued an audit of the use of the facial search functionality within the UK Police National Database (PND) by Police Scotland, following questions directed to the Scottish Government in 2015 about
police use of facial recognition technologies in Scotland. It recommends that the Scottish Government should consider establishing an independent Scottish Commissioner to address the issues of ethical and independent oversight over biometric databases and records held in Scotland. Crucially, the audit comments that perhaps despite public perceptions: “It should be noted at the outset that we use the term ‘facial search’ and not facial recognition as police images in the Criminal History System in Scotland, and those in the broader UK PND system, are not of sufficient digital resolution for them to be used against software that would deliver a true automated recognition capability. In other words, PND does not deliver a facial recognition capability, but instead returns a list of potential image matches that then require further human assessment and investigation.” However, with the advent of improved technology supplying better digital resolution, this could change. For instance, according to an Ars Technica report, Edinburgh Council authorities plan to upgrade the city’s CCTV surveillance network of 214 cameras from analogue cameras to digital systems – ‘bringing powerful new tracking features, such as facial recognition software that allows faces to be scanned in real time and matched against database entries’. Tracey Caldwell
February 2016
This agreement enables Google to deploy its advanced neural computation engine on Movidius ultra-low-power platform, introducing a new way for machine intelligence to run locally on devices. Local computation allows for data to stay on device and function without internet connection and with fewer latency issues. This means that in future small mobile products could have the builtin ability to understand and recognise images and audio quickly and accurately.
government
Australian Taxation Office adds voice authentication to its app
T
HE !USTRALIAN 4AXATION /FFICE !4/ HAS FURTHER EXPANDED ITS
voice authentication programme by integrating Nuance’s voice biometrics technology into its mobile app. Taxpayers can already authenticate using their voice when calling the ATO contact centre. This second phase implementation now offers taxpayers voice biometric authentication across its suite of online services, accessible through the ATO app. The ATO receives approximately 7.2m calls per year and prior to implementing Nuance’s voice biometrics around 76% of these calls required an ATO agent to verify the caller’s identity, at a cost of 75,000 hours of agents’ and customers’ time each year. “The ATO is committed to delivering a contemporary digital experience for our clients and feedback has shown an overwhelming acceptance of voice biometrics in the call center, making it a natural next step to bring this ease of access to the mobile app,” says assistant commissioner, ATO John Dardo.
r&D
lexEnable and Isorg develop large area flexible fingerprint sensor
l
exEnable and Isorg have developed what they claim to be the world’s first large area flexible fingerprint sensor on plastic designed for biometric applications, reports EE Times. With an active area of 86x86mm, a 84μm pitch (78μm pixel size with 6μm spacing) and a 1048576 pixel resolution (1024x1024), the flexible sensor is only 0.3mm thick and can operate in visible and near infra-red up to wavelengths of 900nm. The technology is capable of measuring not only the fingerprint, but also the configuration of veins in the fingers. The large labelthin sensing area can be applied to almost any surface from steering wheel to credit card.
Google works with Movidius to deploy advanced machine intelligence on mobiles
G
oogle is working with Movidius to accelerate the adoption of deep learning within mobile devices. Google will source Movidius processors alongside the Movidius software development environment while contributing to Movidius’ neural network technology roadmap.
12
Biometric Technology Today
COMMENT In the UK the House of Lords has reopened the debate on introducing a biometric ID card for citizens. Lord CampbellSavours argued that a ‘national identity card with relevant biometric data would be a powerful tool in ensuring that people pay the state for the services they receive’. He pointed out that under the Government’s identity assurance programme, IDAP, people assert their identities to government via a series of private sector identity provider. In Campbell-Savours’ view, “Although they LÕ`ÊÀi>ÌÃ «ÃÊÜÌ Ê , ]Ê*9 ]ÊÌ iÊ DVLA and other departments or agencies, they lack access to the necessary biometric data such as fingerprints, digital iris recognition and facial digital photographs. Their programmes are undermined . . . by the lack of a national identity register to underpin the process of identity assurance.” This comes as Scottish authorities are navigating a route through the privacy implications of using biometric technology in law enforcement. Herald Scotland reports that Scottish football officials have been criticised for seeking government support to introduce facial recognition technology to help fight offensive behaviour in stadiums. Meanwhile Scottish Police have issued an audit of the use of the facial search functionality within the UK Police National Database (PND) by Police Scotland, following questions directed to the Scottish Government in 2015 about
police use of facial recognition technologies in Scotland. It recommends that the Scottish Government should consider establishing an independent Scottish Commissioner to address the issues of ethical and independent oversight over biometric databases and records held in Scotland. Crucially, the audit comments that perhaps despite public perceptions: “It should be noted at the outset that we use the term ‘facial search’ and not facial recognition as police images in the Criminal History System in Scotland, and those in the broader UK PND system, are not of sufficient digital resolution for them to be used against software that would deliver a true automated recognition capability. In other words, PND does not deliver a facial recognition capability, but instead returns a list of potential image matches that then require further human assessment and investigation.” However, with the advent of improved technology supplying better digital resolution, this could change. For instance, according to an Ars Technica report, Edinburgh Council authorities plan to upgrade the city’s CCTV surveillance network of 214 cameras from analogue cameras to digital systems – ‘bringing powerful new tracking features, such as facial recognition software that allows faces to be scanned in real time and matched against database entries’. Tracey Caldwell
February 2016