Keeping Biometrics Up to Date

Picture source: eyetruckingupdate.com

INDUSTRIAL ENGINEER – VOLUME 46 NUMBER 5

 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) studying how aging affects IRIS scanning, facial recognition

It turns out that vaunted biometrics systems might not be as foolproof as initially surmised.

SecureIDNews reported that most biometric systems have not been deployed long enough to evaluate the toll that time takes. Even the fingerprint hasn’t been tested to determine aging’s effects to the system. Patrick Grother, project leader of biometric testing at NIST, said that it can’t be faked.

One project by NIST examined millions of transactions from a joint Canadian and American border crossing program to figure out if different biometric modalities change over time. And over eight years, researchers haven’t found evidence of aging effect.

Computer models predict that iris recognition for average people should remain usable for decades. And NIST aims to do age comparison studies on other supposition, like the impact of facial recognition on aging.