1 Introduction and Fundamental Concepts From a very young age, most humans recognize each other easily. A familiar voice, face, or manner of moving helps to identify members of the family—a mother, father, or other caregiver—and can give us comfort, comradeship, and safety. When we find ourselves among strangers, when we fail to recognize the individuals around us, we are more prone to caution and concern about our safety. This human faculty of recognizing others is not foolproof. Hsc Chemistry 5.1 Serial here. We can be misled by similarities in appearance or manners of dress—a mimic may convince us we are listening to a well-known celebrity, and casual acquaintances may be incapable of detecting differences between identical twins. Nonetheless, although this mechanism can sometimes lead to error, it remains a way for members of small communities to identify one another.

As we seek to recognize individuals as members of larger communities, however, or to recognize them at a scale and speed that could dull our perceptions, we need to find ways to automate such recognition. Biometrics is the automated recognition of individuals based on their behavioral and biological characteristics. 1 “Biometrics” today carries two meanings, both in wide use. (See and.) The subject of the current report—the automatic recognition of individuals based on biological and behavioral traits—is one meaning, apparently dating from the early 1980s.

However, in biology, agriculture, medicine, public health, demography, actuarial science, and fields related to these, biometrics, biometry, and biostatistics refer almost synonymously to statistical and mathematical methods for analyzing data in the biological sciences. The two usages of. And fingerprinting were first deployed commercially in the 1970s, almost immediately leading to concerns over spoofing and privacy. Larger pilot projects for banking and government applications became popular in the 1980s. By the 1990s, the fully automated systems for both government and commercial applications used many different technologies, including iris and face recognition.

Clearly both meanings of biometrics are well-established and appropriate and will persist for some time. However, in distinguishing our topic from biometrics in its biostatistical sense, one must note the curiosity that two fields so linked in Galton’s work should a century later have few points of contact. Galton wished to reveal the human manifestations of his cousin Charles Darwin’s theories by classifying and quantifying personal characteristics.