Nomad Biometric Authentication: Towards Mobile and Ubiquitous Person Identification

Our work and living environments are increasingly populated by devices which integrate computational ability and intelligence. The Nomad Biometric Authentication (NOBA) project focuses on the development and implementation of biometric technologies for strong authentication to enable provision of nomadic computing users with services and document dematerialization in secure information and communication systems. NOBA adopted visual capture of biometric information, aiming to achieve, as much as possible, data acquisition which is unobtrusive and transparent to the user. Therefore, the modalities chosen are iris analysis (in low resolution, as it is either based on mobile device capture, or capture at a distance), analysis of face and its characteristic parts, and analysis of gait. Thus, the objective of the NOBA project is to demonstrate the feasibility of a nomad strong authentication service on a distributed environment of ubiquitous and mobile devices, based on acquiring and merging biometric data.