Overview of Biometrics and Biometrics Systems

Recent security threats increase the necessity to establish the identity of every person. Biometric authentication is a solution to person authentication by analyzing physiological or behavioral characteristics. In this chapter, various biometric notions and terms are reviewed, along with typical biometric system components and different functionalities and performance parameters. The design and development of a biometric system, depending on a particular application scenario, is covered. This chapter also focuses on the inherent issues associated with biometric data and system performance through introducing radically new methods based on intelligent information fusion and intelligent pattern recognition, thus creating a notion of intelligent security systems. At the end of the chapter, the potential drawbacks of biometric unimodal systems, which serves as the motivation to introduce the concept of multimodal biometric system in the context of intelligent security systems, is discussed.