Biometric Systems

Biometric techniques are more and more exploited in order to fasten and make more reliable the identification process. In particular, biometric systems exploit the physiological or behavioral characteristics of an individual for the identification task, making possible to verify the identity of an individual by processing "who you are", rather than the classical approach based on "what you possess/know" (e.g., ID card, tokens or passwords). The course discusses the structure and the design of different biometric systems based on fingerprints, iris, face, voice, hand geometry, palm print, and other biometric traits. In the second part, the course presents the design of multimodal biometric systems (systems which exploit the combinations of different biometric traits) and the privacy and security issues related to the application of the biometric systems.
Main topics covered:
· Introduction to biometrics;
· Terms, structure and features of a biometric system;
· Biometric systems based on fingerprints;
· Biometric systems based on iris patterns;
· Biometric systems based on face images;
· Behavioral biometric and DNA;
· Multimodal biometric systems;
· Design, evaluation and comparison of the biometric systems;
· Privacy and security issues.
A detailed list of topics of each lesson is presented and regularly updated on the course site.