“Biometric System Architecture is responsible for various operations in order to correctly identify and authenticate a person using sensors, data pre-processing, feature extraction, template generator, database matching, etc.”
In this modern world, scammers and hackers always try to steal your data via different platforms. Sometimes, these scammers need your passwords, OTP, and other login information. Just think, if the scammers succeed in breaching your data, they can misuse your identity to perform all kinds of criminal activities. Pretending to be someone by using one’s identity is a crime known as Impersonation. We need to be aware of such impersonators to secure our data. In the US, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) works under the United States government, and this commission is responsible for protecting the consumer's data from various threats by applying laws and regulations. In 2021, FTC released a CSN (Consumer Sentinel Network) report that claims more than 5.88 million fraud cases were reported in the year 2021, which is a 19% increase from the previous years.
A biometric system is a computerized method of identifying a person by his/her physical and behavioral traits. After implementing the biometric system, the identity of a person is secured.
The biometric system is a fast process of authenticating a person's identity because the biometrics of a person are unique physical attributes, such as the face, fingerprints, and hand prints are some definite proof of identity.
Some biometric systems also use advanced computing and processing technologies such as Cloud Computing, Machine Learning, and AI where the system deals with huge amount of unlabelled datasets. Its architecture primarily focuses on identifying the commonalities in the data; it also provides data protection by encrypting biometric information, behavior, and pattern recognition.
Stages of a Biometric system
There are two stages of the Biometric system
- 1. User Registration Stage
- 2. Recognition stage
1. User Registration Stage
This is a one-time process to add a new user to the database. It scans the characteristics of the users. In this process, to reduce the chances of error, the data extraction process should be done properly.
2. Recognition Stage
Recognition of a person's identity is the second stage in this process. This process must be fast, accurate, and precise to recognize the user identification.
Architecture of Biometric System
The biometric system architecture consists of several components:
- 1. Sensor: It is a mediator between the system and the real world. It collects all the required data from the users. It is an image acquisition technique, retrieving the image details from external sources to perform further processes.
- 2. Data Pre-processing: After getting input from the sensors, the process began to clean input data from any redundancy, errors, and noise. It performs normalization to clean the data.
- 3. Feature Extraction: Feature extraction is a technique that converts the image raw data into numerical data. Feature extraction techniques perform various operations to remove the redundancy from the image. After removing the redundancies from the input image, some unique features of the scanned image get stored in the database.
- 4. Template Generator: All the extracted features from the image are combined to generate the template. These templates are in the form of vectors or numerical data.
- 5. Database: It maintains a record of the number of users. It stores their biometric scan and helps the matcher in the process of identifying the user.
- 6. Matcher: In this process, whenever a person wants access control of any file or property, the matcher first enquires the database whether they have such a user or not by extracting the feature from that scanned image. Matcher compares it with the various data of the scanned images.
- 7. Output: If the person's scanned images match with the stored data, the biometric system permits the person to get in. In case the person does not have any record in the database, it will flash a message as NO RECORDS FOUND or something like that. The output generation depends upon the pre-processing of the input.
Types of Biometric Characteristics
A person's characteristics fall into the following categories:
1. Physiological Traits: These traits contain the physical characteristics of a person like fingerprints, face, iris pattern, DNA, etc.
2. Behavioral Traits: Behavioral traits are unique too, but developing a behavior takes time, and they become consistent characteristics of a person, such as signature, handwriting, gait, etc.
Everyone in this world has unique characteristics, even in the condition of twins who have identical facial and physical appearances. They also have differences in their behavioral traits. Biometric systems use such features to identify them. It is more secure in comparison with traditional username and password combinations. So, for unauthorized persons, it is a difficult task to access or breach the data inside the Biometric system.
The main goal of this system is to show how efficiently the system works and how accurate it is. Biometric system architecture must be intelligent enough to generate the output in most cases. The system continuously monitors the record of activities. It requires regular security and software updates for possible security and technological breaches.
Types of Biometric Security Systems
Based on Physiological and Behavioral Traits, there are several types of Biometric Security system that we have seen. These biometric systems are contact and contactless in nature and some of these are hybrid in nature as well.
- 1. Fingerprint recognition system
- 2. Facial recognition system
- 3. Iris and retinal recognition system
- 4. Palm scanning system
- 5. Hand scanning system
- 6. Gait scanning system
- 7. Signature recognition system
- 8. Voice recognition system
- 9. Lip-motion recognition system
To conclude, the Biometric System Architecture primarily focuses on improving the registration and recognition process, which helps users to save time. The architecture of the Biometric system is now more complex, difficult to breach its security. Biometric characteristics are improving the identification process of a person and the technology of biometric system is improving the standards of security in building and offices and govt. institutions amongst others.
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