Brain Prints for Biometrics

Newer Types of Biometrics

As mentioned, newer research has focused on alternative biometrics such as those based on gait (Matovski et al., 2012), face features (Kelkboom et al., 2007), palmprint and hand geometry (Kumar et al., 2003), retina (Jeffers et al., 2012), iris (Melin, 2012) and voice (Gupta & Chatterjee, 2012). The second trend is to use signals from brain (Palaniappan, 2006) and heart (Palaniappan and Krishnan, 2004) as biometrics. Such signals from the brain and heart are commonly employed for medical diagnosis but the advantage of using such biological signal based biometrics compared to other biometrics is its distinctiveness, i.e. they are difficult to be duplicated by someone else, therefore not easily forged or stolen. The data collection can be cumbersome though the future improvements will reduce the unwieldiness and the distinctiveness could outweigh the difficulties especially for high security applications. This article will focus on the use of patterns from the brain for both authentication and identification.