Feature Articles

MobileID's Impact on Improving Police Efficiency Highlighted by ACPO's DCC East Midlands Peter Goodman and the NPIA's Nick Deyes

Mobile identification (MobileID) is helping officers to identify individuals by their fingerprints more quickly. Furthermore, MobileID forms part of the Information Systems Improvement Strategy (ISIS), which is transforming the way police technology is developed, procured, implemented and managed. This technological step forward will ultimately help police officers on the front line to carry out their duties more effectively, as Association of Chief Police Officers Lead on MobileID Deputy Chief Constable East Midlands Peter Goodman and Head of ISIS at the National Policing Improvement Agency Nick Deyes explain.

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3M Cogent Led Project Removes 34,000 Illegal Names from Pension Payroll in Ghana

Ghana’s Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning initiative to clear the government’s payroll of ghost names has detected and expunged about 34,000 illegal names in seven regions that were on pensioners’ payroll. These ghost names account for 38% of the pensioners registered so far during the $2.385 million project, led by the US company 3M Cogent. Biometric data has been collected from 54,544 out of the 88,467 pensioners in the Greater Accra, Eastern, Volta, Central, Ashanti, Western and Brong Ahafo regions.

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Face Recognition in the Era of the Cloud and Social Media: Is it Time to Hit the Panic Button?

By Joseph J. Atick - Face recognition, or the ability of computers to automatically pick up faces in photographs and identify who they belong to, is not new. You saw it in James Bond films nearly two decades before the technology was actually invented in academic research centers in the early nineties; and over the last ten years, the technology, propelled by legitimate security needs in the aftermath of 9/11, has evolved dramatically from those fictional depictions to become very real. Today, along with technologies that measure patterns of fingerprints and the iris of the eye, face recognition is a cornerstone in the ensemble of modern biometrics which aim to establish individual identity based on the uniqueness of measurable characteristics of the human body.

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findBIOMETRICS at the Biometric Consortium Conference 2011

findBIOMETRICS is pleased to bring our readers the following exclusive video interviews from the Biometrics Consortium Conference 2011 which was held in Tampa, Florida on September 27-29th. Supported by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the National Security Agency (NSA), the Biometrics Consortium Conference is focused on Biometric Technologies for Defense, Homeland Security, Identity Management, Border Crossing and Electronic Commerce.

We have interviews and demos from MorphoTrak, IBM, Lumidigm, WCC, Aware, Iris ID, Cross Match, Smartmatic, IBIA, BIO-key, IEEE, Fujitsu, AOptix, Smart Sensors, CGI, Cognitec and SpeechPro.

 

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BIO-key Responds to Questions About S.I.C. Biometrics

On Monday, August 15^th 2011 during our second quarter earnings conference call we shared the news of the SIC Acquisition but an incorrect "dial in" number in our announcement and press release resulted in many callers being unable to connect and join the questions and answers session. Therefore, we felt it was imperative to open the discussion to a national audience and add more detail in the following Frequently Asked Question Summary. We are forecasting an enthusiastic response from new and existing customers as we introduce our new full and complete biometric fingerprint solutions for the iPad, iPhone and iPod and welcome any questions or comments that you may have. 

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GelSight Offers High Resolution Portable 3D Imaging Solution with Possible Biometric Applications

A traditional problem with high resolution 3d imaging is interference from the optical colour and texture information from the object being imaged. MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences have now created a highly functional, portable high resolution 3d imaging system called GelSight which bypasses this difficulty entirely. GelSight utilizes a slab of transparent, synthetic rubber, the top side of which is coated with a paint containing tiny flecks of metal. When pressed against the surface of an object, the paint-coated side of the slab deforms.

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British Biometrics Expert Rejects US Research Claiming Face Recognition Technology Undermines Privacy

 The American studies, unveiled last Thursday (August 4th) at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, suggest that face recognition technology has now improved so much that its accuracy threatens privacy in a big way. However, British biometric experts OmniPerception Limited have de-bunked the research as scare-mongering and leapt to the defence of good face recognition technology, properly applied.

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Neuromarketing with Metaphor Elicitation Techniques and Biometric Monitoring

 In 1995, the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique was patented; a market research methodology in which participants are asked to collect a set of pictures that represent their thoughts and feelings about the topic of interest, with the idea in mind that people often think in terms of images rather than in words. Olson Zaltman Associates has now taken this research methodology to the next level. Instead of simply querying people about the images they've chosen, the firm has decided to incorporate biometric techniques including heart rate monitoring and eye movement tracking, jettisoning them into a new field known as neuromarketing research.

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Indian Biometric ID Scheme Poverty Alleviation Mission Gathers Pace

Lahiri told me last year that the project will succeed in India, where the UK failed, because it is about alleviating poverty rather than privacy. He described how giving people an identity will allow them to get a bank account. The cornerstone of life these days. But he went further and explained how the ID scheme will support a cashless society. He said all vendors will have a biometric reader and citizens can pay for things with a fingerprint scan. Even a bag of rice.

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Biometrics May Help Catch Stanley Cup Rioters

The 2011 Vancouver Stanley Cup riots resulted in 140 reported injuries and 100 arrests, and caused an estimated $1 million in damages to public and private property. Over 1 million photos and 1000 hours of video of the event has been submitted to police, prompting the ICBC to offer Vancouver police the use of the facial recognition software they commonly use to identify facial characteristics in driver's license photos to prevent identity fraud.

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