Biometrics

Biometrics refers to a study of physical and behavioral characteristics with the purpose of person identification. In recent years, the area of biometrics has witnessed a tremendous growth, partly as a result of a pressing need for increased security, and partly as a response to the new technological advances and discoveries. Availability of much more affordable storage and the high resolution image biometric capturing devices have contributed to accumulating very large datasets of biometric data and made person identification and verification tasks easier than ever. On the other hand, it also created significant challenges driven by the higher than ever volumes and the complexity of the data, that can no longer be resolved through acquisition of more memory, faster processors or optimization of existing algorithms. These developments justified the need for radically new concepts for massive data storage, processing and synthesis, which is the scope of research in ISPIA partner Biometric Tehcnologies Laboratory, University of Calgary (http://btlab.enel.ucalgary.ca/).