What is Biometrics?

Biometrics is the science and technology of authentication (i.e. establishing the identity of an individual) by measuring the person's physiological or behavioral features. The term is derived from the Greek words "bios" for life and "metron" for degree. Biometrics usually refers to technologies for measuring and analyzing human physiological characteristics such as fingerprints, eye retinas and irises, voice patterns, facial patterns, and hand measurements, especially for authentication purposes. Examples of behavioural characteristics which can be measured include signature recognition, gait recognition, speaker recognition and typing recognition. Biometric technologies are becoming the foundation of an extensive array of highly secure identification and personal verification solutions.  Biometric-based solutions are able to provide for confidential financial transactions and personal data privacy. The need for biometrics can be found in federal, state and local governments, in the military, and in commercial applications. Enterprise-wide network security infrastructures, government IDs, secure electronic banking, investing and other financial transactions, retail sales, law enforcement, and health and social services are already benefiting from these technologies. In a typical IT biometric system, a person registers with the system when one or more of their physiological characteristics are obtained, processed by a numerical algorithm, from which the resulting template is entered into a database. Ideally, the measured features can be compared to the stored template with an adequate confidence level; then when someone else tries to log in, their information should not fully match, so the system will not allow them to log in. Current technologies have widely varying  Error Rates - often quoted in fractions of a percent which in practice can be 10% or more

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