August 9, 2013 – By Peter B. Counter
This week brought with it the announcement of a variety of new biometric platforms that promise to speed things up dramatically and make authentication more accessible, Fingerprint Cards AB’s best quarterly report yet, and plenty of ID verification news. Here’s a look at the past five days in biometrics:
On Tuesday, Japanese high technology company Fujitsu continued to champion its biometric technology of choice, announcing that it has developed a new palm vein authentication technology that can encode 2,048 bit renewable feature codes with an unprecedented false positive rate, while also improving the solution’s speed. The new innovation has been running successfully on current generation PC technology, indicating that vascular recognition will likely make its way into consumer products in the future.
Fingerprint reading also sped up, with BIO-key International introducing a new architecture that accelerates indexing by orders of magnitude. The solution, can be run on typical PC hardware, with off the shelf BIO-key products, further exemplifying that biometric technology is on its way from vertical markets into the hands of consumers.
This possible trend of biometrics for the household and the pocket is giving Fingerprint Cards AB plenty of hope for next year. Late last week, the Swedish manufacturer announced that due to a number of projects being delayed, with clients now considering area sensors instead of swipe sensors, along with the board of directors deciding to expand tech development and support staff for the remainder of 2013, this year will not be a profitable one. With the company’s record breaking second quarter results, released Thursday, FPC’s CEO excitedly pointed to this, along with Microsoft’s strong stance on area sensors and persistent iPhone 5S biometric home button rumors, as reasons to look forward to 2014 as a very strong year for the company.
This week also saw Morpho (Safran)’s US subsidiary MorphoTrak making developments in biometric law enforcement, first with the launch of its Morpho Mobile Gateway software, which allows for the company’s mobile devices to connect to any AFIS, regardless of vendor. On the heels of this launch, the Mesa, AZ Police Department purchased an additional 30 MorphoIDent units, which, when added to the initial six already installed in its patrol cars during a pilot of the mobile ID verification devices, is now enabling complete coverage, with access to not only the state AFIS, but also the national RISC database offered by the FBI.
While on the topic of Safran Group: Morpho, which has been responsible for handling secure identity management in Albania since 2008, has had its concession with the republic’s ministry of interior extended for an additional ten years. The new agreement will not only see Morpho continuing to produce identity documents, but also offering e-Services via its eTrusted Identity Services.
Finally, air travel got a little bit easier in San Antonio International Airport, at least for CLEAR members, now that CLEAR lanes have opened up in order to allow for biometric authentication to allow travelers to pass through security in under five minutes.
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