Biometrics: a grand challenge

Reliable person identification is an important problem in diverse businesses. Biometrics, identification based on distinctive personal traits, has the potential to become an irreplaceable part of any identification system. While successful in some niche markets, the biometrics technology has not yet delivered its promise of foolproof automatic identification. With the availability of inexpensive biometric sensors and computing power, it is becoming increasingly clear that widespread usage of biometric person identification is being stymied by our lack of understanding of three fundamental problems; (i) How to accurately and efficiently represent and recognize biometric patterns? (ii) How to guarantee that the sensed measurements are not fraudulent? and (iii) How to make sure that the application is indeed exclusively using pattern recognition for the expressed purpose (function creep (A. K. JAin et al., December 1998))? Solving these core problems will not only catapult biometrics into mainstream applications but will also stimulate adoption of other pattern recognition applications for providing effective automation of sensitive tasks without jeopardizing our individual freedoms. For these reasons, we view biometrics as a grand challenge - "a fundamental problem in science and engineering with broad economic and scientific impact".