This week in biometrics industry news we saw a lot of reports coming in concerning face, voice and finger-based biometrics, many of which had to do with performance testing and certification.
In the featured articles section, we continued down the Road To Biometrics UnPlugged, now in week three of our summer event leading up the the second annual industry gathering. The theme for July is biometrics in commerce and on Wednesday we took a look at three strong authentication deployments in finance.
Cross Match Technologies announced on Tuesday that its biometric identity management solutions are now available through the UK’s G-Cloud CloudStore. The select products available have applications in law enforcement, mobile ID and border control. The move is in support of the UK government’s initiative to bring IT all across the public sector, changing the way that technology is bought and used by police, government agencies and the military.
LifeMed ID announced this week that its patient identification solution has been implemented at Mid Coast Health Services in Brunswick, Maine. As is the case with patient ID, the end goal here is efficiency and fraud prevention. With LifeMed ID’s solution, access operations become automated, duplicate record making is eliminated and patients are tied to their health records.
Moving on to facial recognition news, Leicestershire Police commented on the benefits that have come with implementing a biometric system from NEC. Only a couple months into a half-year trial period with the force, NEC’s NeoFace can use data from close circuit television systems and police body cameras, comparing dozens of key facial measurements with images in the database and providing initial results in seconds. Approximately 200 suspects have already been put through the system and the chief inspector says the initial results have been very promising.
NEC Corporation’s facial biometrics took first place in a recent performance test undertaken by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This marks the third consecutive NIST test in which NEC’s facial recognition has been put to task and come out on top.
NIST also recently put voice biometrics up to the challenge of developing new methods for using i-vectors for speaker recognition in conversational telephone situations. Among participating voice biometric companies was SpeechPro.
Speaking of voice recognition, a new partnership between Nuance Communications and TRUSTID will be combining biometrics and telephone network forensics to combat call center fraud and shorten call times. Call center representatives benefitting from the combined security resulting from the partnership have assurance that a caller is who she says she is and that nothing shady is happening on the line.
Moving to matters of the finger, M2SYS announced that its smart fingerprint reader, the M2-FuseID, has received PIV certification from the FBI. Multi-factor by design, the M2-FuseID captures both a user’s fingerprint image (at 500 dpi) and her finger vein pattern. PIV certification signifies an FBI standard of quality and interoperability.
Meanwhile, biometric access control solutions provider FST Biometrics announced that it has received factory certification from Lenel Systems, in turn joining the Lenel OpenAccess Alliance program. As a result, FST’s Biometrics In Motion Identification software now interfaces with Lenel’s OnGuard access control system.
Finally, in the Pop Cultural Identity Management blog, we took a look at the cyber crime thriller Swordfish in order to examine how hacking is represented in movies and what the mainstreaming of biometrics might affect in genre filmmaking.
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Continue to stay posted to findBIOMETRICS throughout July as we continue down the road to findBIOMETRICS. Be sure to follow us on Twitter so you don’t miss a beat.
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July 20, 2014 – by Peter B. Counter
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