A Glimpse at the History of Biometrics
A website called Machine Vision Online published an article last month highlighting the progression of biometrics and the biometric industry as it has progressed in the last ten or so years.
Until recently, and specifically after terrorist attacks in 1999 and 2001, the biometric industry was a niche market, relatively obscure and used mostly only by military in higher security environments. Then overnight it seems the biometric industry exploded and now we see stories posted all over the Internet about a new chip being installed into some guy’s head or an iris scanning system installed at a border town.
According to Machine Vision Online’s post, a business group that tracks the biometrics industry says biometrics are expected to generate $9.3 billion in revenue by the year 2014. In 2006 it was down around $700 million and only a few years later skyrocketed up to $2.05 billion. They estimate a 115% increase from 2010 revenues, which totaled around $4.3 billion.
Early on, as the article states, biometrics was seen as a potential market for the machine vision industry. There could be a lot of crossover between vision solutions for mechanics and robotics as well as biometric applications.
As the industry progressed and matured, the amount of work increased and companies began to realize the advantages of biometrics for gaming and software/hardware systems. It seems that fingerprinting is maybe going the way of the dinosaur though. It’s the oldest and most common form of biometrics, but when compared with newer forms, it is suffering.
The FBI has an enormous database of fingerprint data after initially deciding on what is described as a wavelet form for no-loss image compression. That technolgy made for no artifacts and improved reliability as well as quick storage and search. Though fingerprinting had some trouble in the last few years after an American citizen living in Oregon was wrongly identified as a bomber in the Madrid subway attacks in Spain. The fingerprints indicated a 100% match, which turned out to be false. Fingerprinting is based on measure values that can vary depending on whether the sensor comes into contact with a ridge or valley in the actual fingerprint.
Iris recognition and scanning is now the rage as companies begin in install systems. Face recognition is also coming down the line and as soon as those are installed there will probably be a newfangled way that will upend adopted biometrics in the near future.
Machine Vision Puts Bold Face On Growing Biometrics Industry
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