A survey of biometric recognition methods

Biometric recognition refers to an automatic recognition of individuals based on a feature vector (s) derived from their physiological and/or behavioral characteristic. Biometric recognition systems should provide a reliable personal recognition schemes to either confirm or determine the identity of an individual. Applications of such a system include computer systems security, secure electronic banking, mobile phones, credit cards, secure access to buildings, health and social services. By using biometrics a person could be identified based on "who she/he is" rather then "what she/he has" (card, token, key) or "what she/he knows" (password, PIN). In this paper, a brief overview of biometric methods, both unimodal and multimodal, and their advantages and disadvantages, will be presented.