As one of the earliest biometric technologies focused on analyzing the physical dimensions of the human hand for identity verification and authentication, hand geometry is widely utilized in commercial physical access control applications. Hand geometry involves generating a complete image of the hand via high resolution imaging, analyzing and measuring specific characteristics of hand, such as, shape of the hand, thickness and width of the palm, length of the fingers, and generating matching results from database. The technology, over the years, has been driven by government regulations mandating stringent security measures to be in place for key infrastructure and commercial centers such as nuclear plants, universities, factories, office buildings, hospitality, and healthcare facilities, among others. The technology also finds widespread use in time & attendance maintenance applications.
Hand geometry is projected to witness increased adoption in the healthcare, banking and financial services sectors. Key benefits of the technology responsible for driving adoption beyond the boundaries of the traditional manufacturing end-use sector include greater user acceptance as against the socially stigmatized fingerprint biometrics, lower error rates, and rugged operational ability to optimally function in extreme environmental conditions. Despite the technology’s non-discriminative characteristics and its limited potential in the use of personal identification, interest continues to exist in hand geometry as a cost effective medium for personal verification and user authentication. Hand geometry therefore continues to remain a perfect choice for user authentication in harsh work environments and among establishments with a large workforce. Low upfront costs, relatively simple technology architecture, less intrusiveness, are all advantages stacked in its favor. In addition, the small template size of each captured data set ranging typically from 352 to 1209 bytes reduces the burden on storage infrastructure and therefore appeals to even small and medium scale enterprises.
Other factors poised to support growth in the market, even against the backdrop of competitive threat from competing technology substitutes like Iris, fingerprint, palmprint, and voice, include the ever-present threat from antisocial elements and the ensuing liability losses caused by workplace violence, theft, and other instances of security breach. All of these factors foster the need for cost effective yet efficient security solutions. Also, increasing decentralization of workforce and globalization is driving the adoption of hand geometry systems for identifying employees.
With business organizations expanding beyond regional boundaries, workforce mobility has increased substantially in the recent times. Increasing offshore travel of employees is creating the demand for hand geometry systems as they allow offshore offices of parent company to authenticate whether visiting personnel are indeed the people they claim to be, just by comparing their hand prints captured when they arrive at the regional office with their hand images registered in the parent company’s database.
Although still under research and development, promising research outcomes in the field of contact-less hand geometry biometric systems infuses optimism into the market’s future outlook. Contact-less hand geometry systems involves analysis of geometric proportions of the hand based on images captured by static video camera or IR sensitive camera unlike image capture platforms which require direct contact of the hand with the system. Developments in pattern recognition techniques like K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) for object recognition is additionally benefiting the research outcomes in this space.
In the upcoming years, the CIVETS countries are poised to emerge into the next cluster of developing markets to turbo-charge future growth in the market as the BRIC countries slowdown. Characterized by burgeoning economies, increase in foreign investments, fast paced urbanization, presence of large relatively untapped private security markets, CIVETS is forecast to witness increased adoption of security systems. Rapid expansion in construction, commercial, public and residential, in this region will create new opportunities for biometrics based access control systems including hand geometry systems. Growing economic activity, establishment of new business operations across all industrial sectors increases the need for identity verification.
As stated by the new market research report on Hand Geometry, the US continues to remain the largest regional market accounting for a majority share in global sales. Asia-Pacific represents one of the fastest growing regional markets with sales in the region waxing at a CAGR of about 12.5% over the analysis period.
Major players in the global marketplace include Ingersoll-Rand Plc, RTC Associates Inc., and Inception Technologies Inc., among others.
The research report titled “Hand Geometry: A Global Strategic Business Report” announced by Global Industry Analysts Inc., provides a comprehensive review of market trends, issues, drivers, company profiles, mergers, acquisitions and other strategic industry activities. The report provides market estimates and projections for global hand geometry market in US$ Thousand for all major geographic markets such as the US, Canada, Europe (France, Germany, UK and Rest of Europe), Asia-Pacific, Middle East, and Latin America.
For more details about this comprehensive market research report, please visit http://www.strategyr.com/Hand_Geometry_Market_Report.asp
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