Large-scale biometric identification: Challenges and solutions

In addition to law enforcement applications, many civil applications will require biometrics-based identification systems and a large percentage is predicted to rely on fingerprints as an identifer. Even though fingerprint as a biometric has been used in many identification applications, mostly these applications have been semi-automatic. The results of such systems often require to be validated by human experts. With the increased use of biometric identification systems in many real-time applications, the challenges for large-scale biometric identification are significant both in terms of improving accuracy and response time. In this paper, we briey review the tools, terminology and methods used in large-scale biometrics identification applications. The performance of the identification algorithms need to be significantly improved to successfully handle millions of persons in the biometrics database matching thousands of transactions per day.