Mobile Cloud Computing for Biometric Applications

The cloud computing concept became popular in 2006 and encapsulates a business model of providing services across the Internet. The Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) concept was proposed in 2007. Recent advances in cloud computing have given a platform to various computationally heavy tasks and made them readily accessible to even mobile devices. Biometric applications are dedicated to fingerprint, face, or iris scanning and they typically work in a laboratory setting where the client computer has unlimited access to the throughput and computational resources of the network. Mobile devices can bring biometric evidence back to the laboratory in order for it to be processed. On a cloud infrastructure, information processing could be completed much faster. The limiting factor then becomes the battery power of the device and the throughput of the communication channel of the client node to the cloud. It is important to reduce as much as possible the packet size of the query or task given to the cloud, and also minimize the size of the received response to be able to incorporate cloud biometric technology for real time evidence processing. This position paper sets the mobile cloud computing agenda for biometric applications.