- Email: [email protected]
Banking sector turns to biometric authentication
NEWS marketing
consumer
Advertisers promote ice cream with facial recognition billboard
Microsoft SDK boosts facial and speech recognition on Xbox
U
M
nilever-owned ice cream manufacturer Streets is reported to have launched a facial recognition billboard to promote its Magnum Infinity product in Australia. The billboard, on display in various locations in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, has facial recognition technology. Passersby viewing the screen are invited to smile to activate the device and then virtually bite the Magnum Infinity on the billboard.
mobile
Precise Biometrics’ Tactivo biometric case certified for iPhone
A
pple has certified precise Precise Biometrics’ Tactivo for mobile security for smartphones and tablets. Tactivo is a smart casing for tablets and smartphones that includes an embedded fingerprint and smart card reader. The first delivery of Tactivo for iPhone has arrived from the company’s new production partner, Flextronics in the US, and Precise Biometrics estimates that the first orders for Tactivo will come during summer 2012.
Tactivo biometric case certified for iphone.
icrosoft has launched a software developers’ toolkit (SDK) that enhances biometrics on the Xbox. The SDK will allow developers to work with improved facial recognition software that adds a 3D mesh to a user’s features and tracks expressions including blinks, smiles or frowns and responds to that. The toolkit also brings advanced skeletal capture and speech recognition.
EVENTS CALENDAR 22–28 July 2012 Phoenix, Arizona, US
Annual IAI International Educational Conference 2012 The conference presents scientific educational sessions, using the most efficient methodologies and technical products and advances in the identification field. It offers general sessions, poster presentations, hands-on workshops, field trips, and vendor exhibits. Every forensic discipline subcommittee offers some type of training. Levels of the educational sessions range from basic to advanced. More information: www.theiai.org/conference/
20–22 August 2012 Washington DC, US
banking
Biometrics & Identity Management Exhibition and Conference
Banking sector turns to biometric authentication
The IDGA has developed a two-day conference programme and technology exhibition that will educate about the advancements in biometric technologies and the tactical implementation of the technology in areas including law enforcement (local, state and federal), intelligence, public safety, national security, military corrections and population management. More information: http://www.bioidentityexpo.com
T
6–7 September 2012
he banking sector is increasingly turning to biometric authentication to enable mobile banking and to ensure authentication in developing economies. Communication Intelligence Corporation (known as CSC) has teamed with Daon to launch a biometric authentication service to help banks reduce risk and protect customers from fraud and identity theft. The offering, ConfidentID Mobile, is built on Daon’s IdentityX platform and provides in and outof-band identity authentication for online, mobile and other channel transactions, allowing financial institutions to customise the level of security required for different types of transactions. The service works by combining passwords, personal identification numbers (PINs) and public key infrastructure (PKI) security architecture, along with optional biometrics such as face recognition, voice and palm recognition. Location intelligence is also used for verification through global positioning system (GPS), IP location and cellular triangulation. CSC has reported total revenue of $667,000 for the three months ended 31 March 2012, an increase of $390,000 or 141%, compared to total revenue of $277,000 for the same quarter in the previous year. In Africa, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has responded to serious issues of identity and verification in the country with plans for all customers to adopt the new National Identity Number (NIN) to be issued from September and complete a verification exercise Continued on back page...
Darmstadt, Germany
International Conference of the Biometrics Special Interest Group (BIOSIG) 2012 The BIOSIG 2012 conference addresses security and compliance issues and will present innovations and best practices. The conference is organised jointly by the Competence Center for Applied Security Technology (CAST), the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC), the TeleTrusT-Association, the Norwegian Biometrics Laboratory (NBL), the Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED) the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD, and the special interest group BIOSIG of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI). The conference will be co-sponsored by IEEE and papers will be added to IEEE Xplore. More information: www.biosig.org/biosig2012
18–20 September 2012 Florida, US 2012 Biometric Consortium Conference and Technology Expo The 2012 Conference and Expo, presented by AFCEA, NIST and NSA, will address the important role that biometrics plays in identification and verification of individuals for government and commercial applications worldwide focuses on biometric technologies for homeland security, identity management, border crossing, electronic commerce, and other applications. More information: www.biometrics.org
29–31 October 2012 London, UK
Biometrics Exhibition and Conference 2012 The conference runs from 29-31 October, while the exhibition runs from 30-31 October. Now in its 15th year, the annual Biometrics Show aims to give all attendees a fresh experience combining the best of what they have come to expect from the Biometrics Show together with some new features to help attendees make connections. More information: www.biometrics.elsevier.com
3 June 2012
Biometric Technology Today
NEWS/COMMENT ...Continued from page 3 by 31 December 2012, which will involve capturing unspecified biometrics.
Fingerprints to verify international money transfer at POS
F
ingerprint recognition is to be used to verify international money transfers made to mobile wallets through point of sale (POS) devices located in other countries. Mobilis Networks, an international software applications company offering mobile wallet and billing solutions for mobile operators, has launched software services to enable point-of-sale fingerprint verification for international money transfers to mobile wallets and NFC mobile payments that support any mobile phone. By deploying Mobilis’ mobile wallet services for international remittances, a mobile operator can receive international money transfers directly into their subscribers’ mobile wallets through point-of-sale devices located in other countries.
borders
Vision-Box unveils vb i-match multimodal border gate
A
new e-gate for borders supports iris, fingerprint and facial recognition biometrics. Vision-Box, biometrics solution provider, has announced the availability of the multimodal biometric ABC eGate, based on the ABC eGate deployed recently at the Netherlands’ Schiphol airport. The product, called vb i-match, is said to enable validation of electronic ID documents in 100% of cases.
facial recognition
Australians oppose facial recognition in social media
H
alf of Australians oppose the use of facial recognition in social media, according to a Unisys Security Index finding. The majority of respondents support facial recognition technology being used in law enforcement and to protect borders, but there is 12
Biometric Technology Today
less support for facial recognition technology in the workplace. This comes as Face.com has released KLIK 1.0 for iPhone, an app capable of tagging photos of Facebook friends automatically via realtime mobile facial recognition. The national survey of 1,206 adults conducted in March 2012 by Newspoll for Unisys found that 50% of Australians surveyed do not support the use of facial recognition technology to make it easier for Facebook users to identity or tag friends in photos. “The research findings clearly show that the Australian public’s support for facial recognition technology is determined by the context within which it is used,” says John Kendall, security program director, Unisys Asia Pacific. The majority of Australians surveyed, 95%, said they supported airport customs or immigration staff using facial recognition to identify passengers on police watch-lists, while only 4% did not. 92% of respondents said they agreed with the use of facial recognition technology to help police identify people from security cam-
era footage or video obtained from the public. Only 6% of those surveyed said that they found this use unacceptable. While 66% of respondents said they supported employers using facial recognition to identify what parts of a building staff had accessed and with whom,, 29% said they opposed the idea.
privacy
New York proposes to stop fingerprinting for food stamps
T
he governor of New York City has proposed regulations that would make New York City stop fingerprinting food stamp applicants. In New York City 1.8m people benefit from the federal programme that requires the fingerprinting of food stamp applicants.
COMMENT Biometric technology has hit the mainstream in a number of sectors, from consumer to law enforcement. Yet much of the technology remains proprietary, a situation typical of a sector that is maturing. Recent technical developments indicate that the closed, proprietary nature of much of the biometrics industry may be changing. Developers wishing to introduce biometrics into wider systems or to integrate multiple modes of biometric technology will be interested in announcements from vendor Texas Instruments and researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Texas Instruments (TI) has introduced the C6748 digital signal processing (DSP) development kit for real-time analysis of applications such as fingerprint recognition and face detection, enabling systems to sense and analyse biometric information for access control, for example. The kit includes several templates for biometric analytics applications, such as fingerprint recognition and face detection, offering a starting point for developing and demonstrating the real-time intelligence of the digital signal processing and, says TI, enabling developers to run demos in less than 10 minutes and begin creating DSP applications in less than one hour.
The kit is vendor-independent and the realtime analysis of biometric data would seem to lend itself to many applications. Separately, researchers at NIST have been working on a protocol for communicating with biometric sensors over wired and wireless networks for some time and published the fruits of their labours in late May (see page 1). NIST believes that the WS-Biometric Devices protocol will simplify setting up and maintaining secure biometric systems for verifying identity because such biometric systems will be easier to assemble with interoperable components compared to current biometric systems that generally have proprietary device-specific drivers and cables. Researchers demonstrated how this works using a tablet and two biometric sensors. A tap on the tablet signalled the web-enabled fingerprint sensor to capture four fingerprints from the hand on the scanner and send it back to the tablet. A tap on another button controls a camera to take a photo for facial recognition. The value of biometric technology for authentication on mobile devices is increasingly being recognised and manufacturers from Fujitsu to Precise Biometrics are also unveiling enhanced technologies to enable this (see news pages). The future of mobile, multi-modal and real-time biometrics is very much upon us. Tracey Caldwell
June 2012
consumer
Advertisers promote ice cream with facial recognition billboard
Microsoft SDK boosts facial and speech recognition on Xbox
U
M
nilever-owned ice cream manufacturer Streets is reported to have launched a facial recognition billboard to promote its Magnum Infinity product in Australia. The billboard, on display in various locations in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, has facial recognition technology. Passersby viewing the screen are invited to smile to activate the device and then virtually bite the Magnum Infinity on the billboard.
mobile
Precise Biometrics’ Tactivo biometric case certified for iPhone
A
pple has certified precise Precise Biometrics’ Tactivo for mobile security for smartphones and tablets. Tactivo is a smart casing for tablets and smartphones that includes an embedded fingerprint and smart card reader. The first delivery of Tactivo for iPhone has arrived from the company’s new production partner, Flextronics in the US, and Precise Biometrics estimates that the first orders for Tactivo will come during summer 2012.
Tactivo biometric case certified for iphone.
icrosoft has launched a software developers’ toolkit (SDK) that enhances biometrics on the Xbox. The SDK will allow developers to work with improved facial recognition software that adds a 3D mesh to a user’s features and tracks expressions including blinks, smiles or frowns and responds to that. The toolkit also brings advanced skeletal capture and speech recognition.
EVENTS CALENDAR 22–28 July 2012 Phoenix, Arizona, US
Annual IAI International Educational Conference 2012 The conference presents scientific educational sessions, using the most efficient methodologies and technical products and advances in the identification field. It offers general sessions, poster presentations, hands-on workshops, field trips, and vendor exhibits. Every forensic discipline subcommittee offers some type of training. Levels of the educational sessions range from basic to advanced. More information: www.theiai.org/conference/
20–22 August 2012 Washington DC, US
banking
Biometrics & Identity Management Exhibition and Conference
Banking sector turns to biometric authentication
The IDGA has developed a two-day conference programme and technology exhibition that will educate about the advancements in biometric technologies and the tactical implementation of the technology in areas including law enforcement (local, state and federal), intelligence, public safety, national security, military corrections and population management. More information: http://www.bioidentityexpo.com
T
6–7 September 2012
he banking sector is increasingly turning to biometric authentication to enable mobile banking and to ensure authentication in developing economies. Communication Intelligence Corporation (known as CSC) has teamed with Daon to launch a biometric authentication service to help banks reduce risk and protect customers from fraud and identity theft. The offering, ConfidentID Mobile, is built on Daon’s IdentityX platform and provides in and outof-band identity authentication for online, mobile and other channel transactions, allowing financial institutions to customise the level of security required for different types of transactions. The service works by combining passwords, personal identification numbers (PINs) and public key infrastructure (PKI) security architecture, along with optional biometrics such as face recognition, voice and palm recognition. Location intelligence is also used for verification through global positioning system (GPS), IP location and cellular triangulation. CSC has reported total revenue of $667,000 for the three months ended 31 March 2012, an increase of $390,000 or 141%, compared to total revenue of $277,000 for the same quarter in the previous year. In Africa, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has responded to serious issues of identity and verification in the country with plans for all customers to adopt the new National Identity Number (NIN) to be issued from September and complete a verification exercise Continued on back page...
Darmstadt, Germany
International Conference of the Biometrics Special Interest Group (BIOSIG) 2012 The BIOSIG 2012 conference addresses security and compliance issues and will present innovations and best practices. The conference is organised jointly by the Competence Center for Applied Security Technology (CAST), the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC), the TeleTrusT-Association, the Norwegian Biometrics Laboratory (NBL), the Center for Advanced Security Research Darmstadt (CASED) the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD, and the special interest group BIOSIG of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI). The conference will be co-sponsored by IEEE and papers will be added to IEEE Xplore. More information: www.biosig.org/biosig2012
18–20 September 2012 Florida, US 2012 Biometric Consortium Conference and Technology Expo The 2012 Conference and Expo, presented by AFCEA, NIST and NSA, will address the important role that biometrics plays in identification and verification of individuals for government and commercial applications worldwide focuses on biometric technologies for homeland security, identity management, border crossing, electronic commerce, and other applications. More information: www.biometrics.org
29–31 October 2012 London, UK
Biometrics Exhibition and Conference 2012 The conference runs from 29-31 October, while the exhibition runs from 30-31 October. Now in its 15th year, the annual Biometrics Show aims to give all attendees a fresh experience combining the best of what they have come to expect from the Biometrics Show together with some new features to help attendees make connections. More information: www.biometrics.elsevier.com
3 June 2012
Biometric Technology Today
NEWS/COMMENT ...Continued from page 3 by 31 December 2012, which will involve capturing unspecified biometrics.
Fingerprints to verify international money transfer at POS
F
ingerprint recognition is to be used to verify international money transfers made to mobile wallets through point of sale (POS) devices located in other countries. Mobilis Networks, an international software applications company offering mobile wallet and billing solutions for mobile operators, has launched software services to enable point-of-sale fingerprint verification for international money transfers to mobile wallets and NFC mobile payments that support any mobile phone. By deploying Mobilis’ mobile wallet services for international remittances, a mobile operator can receive international money transfers directly into their subscribers’ mobile wallets through point-of-sale devices located in other countries.
borders
Vision-Box unveils vb i-match multimodal border gate
A
new e-gate for borders supports iris, fingerprint and facial recognition biometrics. Vision-Box, biometrics solution provider, has announced the availability of the multimodal biometric ABC eGate, based on the ABC eGate deployed recently at the Netherlands’ Schiphol airport. The product, called vb i-match, is said to enable validation of electronic ID documents in 100% of cases.
facial recognition
Australians oppose facial recognition in social media
H
alf of Australians oppose the use of facial recognition in social media, according to a Unisys Security Index finding. The majority of respondents support facial recognition technology being used in law enforcement and to protect borders, but there is 12
Biometric Technology Today
less support for facial recognition technology in the workplace. This comes as Face.com has released KLIK 1.0 for iPhone, an app capable of tagging photos of Facebook friends automatically via realtime mobile facial recognition. The national survey of 1,206 adults conducted in March 2012 by Newspoll for Unisys found that 50% of Australians surveyed do not support the use of facial recognition technology to make it easier for Facebook users to identity or tag friends in photos. “The research findings clearly show that the Australian public’s support for facial recognition technology is determined by the context within which it is used,” says John Kendall, security program director, Unisys Asia Pacific. The majority of Australians surveyed, 95%, said they supported airport customs or immigration staff using facial recognition to identify passengers on police watch-lists, while only 4% did not. 92% of respondents said they agreed with the use of facial recognition technology to help police identify people from security cam-
era footage or video obtained from the public. Only 6% of those surveyed said that they found this use unacceptable. While 66% of respondents said they supported employers using facial recognition to identify what parts of a building staff had accessed and with whom,, 29% said they opposed the idea.
privacy
New York proposes to stop fingerprinting for food stamps
T
he governor of New York City has proposed regulations that would make New York City stop fingerprinting food stamp applicants. In New York City 1.8m people benefit from the federal programme that requires the fingerprinting of food stamp applicants.
COMMENT Biometric technology has hit the mainstream in a number of sectors, from consumer to law enforcement. Yet much of the technology remains proprietary, a situation typical of a sector that is maturing. Recent technical developments indicate that the closed, proprietary nature of much of the biometrics industry may be changing. Developers wishing to introduce biometrics into wider systems or to integrate multiple modes of biometric technology will be interested in announcements from vendor Texas Instruments and researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Texas Instruments (TI) has introduced the C6748 digital signal processing (DSP) development kit for real-time analysis of applications such as fingerprint recognition and face detection, enabling systems to sense and analyse biometric information for access control, for example. The kit includes several templates for biometric analytics applications, such as fingerprint recognition and face detection, offering a starting point for developing and demonstrating the real-time intelligence of the digital signal processing and, says TI, enabling developers to run demos in less than 10 minutes and begin creating DSP applications in less than one hour.
The kit is vendor-independent and the realtime analysis of biometric data would seem to lend itself to many applications. Separately, researchers at NIST have been working on a protocol for communicating with biometric sensors over wired and wireless networks for some time and published the fruits of their labours in late May (see page 1). NIST believes that the WS-Biometric Devices protocol will simplify setting up and maintaining secure biometric systems for verifying identity because such biometric systems will be easier to assemble with interoperable components compared to current biometric systems that generally have proprietary device-specific drivers and cables. Researchers demonstrated how this works using a tablet and two biometric sensors. A tap on the tablet signalled the web-enabled fingerprint sensor to capture four fingerprints from the hand on the scanner and send it back to the tablet. A tap on another button controls a camera to take a photo for facial recognition. The value of biometric technology for authentication on mobile devices is increasingly being recognised and manufacturers from Fujitsu to Precise Biometrics are also unveiling enhanced technologies to enable this (see news pages). The future of mobile, multi-modal and real-time biometrics is very much upon us. Tracey Caldwell
June 2012