Pacific Business News

Hands down, the way to confirm ID

By Howard Dicus
November 15, 2002

Look into the lens.

Let the computer look into your eye.

Yup, it's you. The door unlocks.

When many of us think of biometrics - the use of biological measurements to identify us - we think of iris recognition, like we see in the movies. Or the computer recognition of whole faces.

We think of security. Biometric identification keeps terrorists from getting away with impersonating ground workers at San Francisco International Airport. It's going to be standard soon at the Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA. Get ready to think differently.

"We installed our system in 1997," said Keoni Wagner, spokesman for Hawaiian Airlines. "We put hand scanners in at 15 places where employees used to punch timecards."

Hawaiian didn't do it for security reasons. It did it to save money and hassle. "We used to have 180 boxes full of timecards," Wagner said. "Every one of them had been handled by someone in accounting. It makes a huge difference to have this dealt with automatically."

Hawaiian's hand scanners have internal digital cameras that photograph the hand and compare it to an average of three stored images.

What, no iris reader? No face recognition?

"Actually, hand geometry is the largest chunk of the biometrics market, about 40 percent," said Stephen Elliott of Purdue University, who spoke this week at the Hawaii Biometrics Conference in Waikiki. "And finger recognition is the second biggest." Hand geometry measures hands in more than 90 ways, Elliott said. It goes beyond fingerprints, which, by the way, are also biometrics. "Hand geometry is ready for prime time," he said. "That's what they use at San Francisco International Airport for employee access. And the University of Georgia uses it in dormitories to control student access to food services."

Hand geometry is what Bank of Hawaii uses at a branch in Waianae. "We moved the branch, so it was an opportunity to try a new system," Bankoh spokesman Stafford Kiguchi said. "It controls access to safe deposit boxes." A lot of other biometric fields are growing rapidly, but each has its own particular uses and its own challenges.

"We're going to get some face-recognition software," said Peggy Regentine of Windward Community College, cosponsor of this week's conference with the Pacific Center for Advanced Technology Training. "We can't wait to use it."

Face recognition has gotten a lot of public attention because surveillance cameras in public places cross the line from voluntary to involuntary scanning. But, apart from the privacy issue, face scans produce a lot of false identifications unless a full frontal view of the face can be obtained.

"But then, every system has its plusses and minuses. Look at this room," Elliott said, gesturing to the door of a conference room at the Sheraton Waikiki as bright sunlight streamed in. "How well would a hand scanner or iris scanner work with all that sunlight?"

Despite the problems, concerns and limitations, biometrics will be a $601 million business this year. Next year it will be a $928 million business. The year after that it will be a $1.47 billion business.

"We can be reasonably certain of these numbers," said Kush Wadhwa, senior consultant with the International Biometric Group. "Because a lot of biometrics systems are being installed under federal deadlines."

Wadhwa brought those and other numbers on his 21-hour journey from New York for this week's conference. IBG contacted the known biometric contractors for this year's figures and extrapolated from there, but with the benefit of more information than most forecasters have. Laws like the Patriot Act, the Aviation and Transportation Security Act and the Enhanced Border Security Act mandate biometric identification or checkpoint controls at specific locations or covering special numbers of federal employees by dates certain.

Wadhwa does concede that IBG's earlier projections have been optimistic. "Because of the long period of time that the government has taken to put in its own systems, local governments and the private sector have taken a wait-and-see attitude before committing to one method or another," he said.

His company studies all those methods. American Airlines, Microsoft and 30 banks are among the companies underwriting IBG's testing of competing biometric methods and rival vendors for each. For the time being, Wadhwa thinks all the major biometric methods will survive and grow, most of them doubling in sales in 2003. And not just in the United States.

"In five years," he said, "we think the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East and India will account for 40 percent of the biometric business, more than North America, which by then will have 35 percent of the market."

Look for a lot more biometric applications, too. Wadhwa sees biometrics in visas and passports, in voter registration cards, and eventually on IDs used for commerce.