Title: BIOMETRICS: Techniques for Personal Identification

Date: Wednesday, 1 August 2001

Time: 4:00-5:00pm

Venue: Lecture Theater G, Phase II (via lift nos. 25/26), HKUST

Abstract:
Associating an identity with an individual is called personal identification. In today's complex, geographically mobile, increasingly inter-connected information society, accurate personal identification is becoming very important. Here are a few mind boggling numbers: about $1 billion in welfare benefits in the United States are annually claimed by "double dipping" welfare recipients with fraudulent multiple identities; about $1 billion worth of cellular telephone calls are made by the cellular bandwidth thieves--many of which are made from stolen PINs and/or cellular phones. The traditional methods of authentication based on a person's possession (e.g., a key) or a person's knowledge of a piece of information (e.g., a password) are not extremely reliable. A biometric system utilizes a person's physiological or behavioral characteristics for establishing his identity. An increasing number of commercial biometric systems based on fingerprints, iris scan, facial images, hand geometry, speech, and signature are becoming available. In this talk, we will emphasize the important applications of biometrics, highlight the challenges in designing a biometric system and describe a prototype fingerprint-based identification system which we have developed.

Biography:
Anil K. Jain is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University. He served as the department Chair between 1995-1999. His research interests include statistical pattern recognition, Markov random fields, texture analysis, neural networks, document image analysis, fingerprint matching and 3D object recognition. He received the best paper awards in 1987 and 1991 and certificates for outstanding contributions in 1976, 1979, 1992, and 1997 from the Pattern Recognition Society. He also received the 1996 IEEE Trans. Neural Networks Outstanding Paper Award. He was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Trans. on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (1990-94). He is the co-author of Algorithms for Clustering Data, Prentice-Hall, 1988, has edited the book Real-Time Object Measurement and Classification, Springer-Verlag, 1988, and co-edited the books, Analysis and Interpretation of Range Images, Springer-Verlag, 1989, Markov Random Fields, Academic Press, 1992, Artificial Neural Networks and Pattern Recognition, Elsevier, 1993, 3D Object Recognition, Elsevier, 1993, and BIOMETRICS: Personal Identification in Networked Society, Kluwer in 1999. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and IAPR. He received a Fullbright research award in 1998 and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2001.