BY Lakshika Vaishnav | March 16, 2020
Biometric is the science that deals with identification of individuals based on a person’s physical and behavioral attributes. It is the most advanced technology used in modern world for identification of an individual via fingerprints, DNA, or iris. Basic perspective of biometric authentication is that every person can be accurately identified by his or her physical or behavioral traits. Biometric systems make use of fingerprint, hand geometry, iris, retina, face, hand-vein, facial thermograms, signature, or voice print to verify a person. Quality of a biometric system is affected by two factors; Authenticity of a sensor used, Degree of freedom offered by features extracted from sensed signals.
Advancement of biometrics in various fields of forensic such as Fingerprint, DNA, Face, Palm prints, Iris, Voice, Odor and Gait Biometrics, is replacing manual methods of identification and analysis and also aids in a less time-consuming method for analysis whereas manual methods are slow and take more time to solve a crime. Biometric system includes 3 major steps:
1. Feature Extraction
2. Feature Robustness
3. Feature Matching
Biometrics is solely an automated system to establish the identity of a person based on various physical and behavioral attributes of an individual. It acquires these attributes and when at the time of the crime or establishing an identity of an individual, it extracts salient feature set from the data and helps to compare acquired feature set from a crime scene to that of a stored feature set in database. This procedure helps in real-time identification of an individual with a database of a complete set of information, and hence provide a forensic scientist with a proper result of comparison.
A biometric system contains four components:
This device acquires all types of raw biometric features of a particular attribute and quality is increased by using scanning and camera device, and collected information is stored in the database.
Further, after assessing the quality of raw data, a template is formed by subjecting raw data to ‘signal enhancement algorithm’ to improve its quality and then this data is processed and set of traits are extracted to represent the unique features, this is stored in a database and known as a template.
In this module, templates found or recovered are compared with stored templates, and matching score between two is given, and based on the matching score identity of a person is established.
This database is a storage system of biometrics, templates extracted from raw data along with some biographic information of the person is stored here permanently.
Note- Sherlock Institute of Forensic Science India is a pioneer in providing investigation services and short-term and long-term forensic science courses, both online and offline. They have been serving the nation since 2006 and have transformed the lives of many students across the globe.
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References
Saini, Monika, and Anup Kumar Kapoor. "Biometrics in Forensic Identification: Applications and Challenges." Journal of Forensic Medicine 1.2 (2016): n. pag. Print.
Jain, Anil K., and Arun Ross. "Bridging the Gap: From Biometrics to Forensics." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 370.1674 (2015): 20140254. Print.
Bowyer, Kevin W., Karen Hollingsworth, and Patrick J. Flynn. "Image Understanding for Iris Biometrics: A Survey." Computer Vision and Image Understanding 110.2 (2008): 281-307. Print.
Rattani, A., D. R. Kisku, M. Bicego, and M. Tistarelli. "Feature Level Fusion of Face and Fingerprint Biometrics." 2007 First IEEE International Conference on Biometrics: Theory, Applications, and Systems (2007): n. pag. Print.