2003-2005 Biometric technology has been recognised as a key technology for improving security and trust in different fields of modern society. Furthermore, biometrics is an enabler of Ambient Intelligence, in securing service access and personalization.
In order to fulfil expectations set for biometrics, some key questions must be answered: unsatisfactory performance with certain methods; reliability and resistance to fake attempts; insufficient technological solutions for assuring privacy and ownership of user's biometric data; incompatibility of components, subsystems, biometric data, usage procedures and performance metrics due to lacking standards; poor usability as well as problems with general acceptability; lack of well defined use-cases and scenarios.
BioSec is a two-year Integrated Project within the FP6 IST programme towards answers for the above listed challenges. BioSec will provide improved performance to: novel 3D face and hand method, noise-cancellation based voice verification method, as well as with emphasis on multimodal biometrics, including face-voice and iris-finger combinations used together with advanced classification methodology. Fake-resistive methods will be developed for high security fingerprint and iris verification. Token-based solutions are developed for enhanced privacy in sensitive applications. BioSec consortium observes and actively contributes to the development of biometric standards.
The aim is in disseminating project results to general public, scientific community, business and public bodies in the field. Coherent methods and practises for performance evaluation will be developed and applied in the project. This includes also acquisition and deployment of sufficient test material in the form of databases, latter to be made available for the RandD community. The usability and attitude issues will be an integral part of planning biometric use-cases. Scenarios will focus on the cases of remote access and physical access control.