On testing methods for biometric authentication

The use of biometric data for user authentication and/or
recognition is now a reality. On the other hand, there is
still a strong need for new technologies to overpass
intrinsic limitations of already “established” techniques.
This not only requires to devise new algorithms but to
determine the real potential and limitations of existing
techniques. This is possible only devising standard testing
and assessment procedures based on statistical
observations of the outputs of the system. In order to
define better a standard evaluation process, a system based
on space-variant iconic image matching is described and
the validation procedure defined. I turns out that all
methods based on the same biometric measurements have
the same intrinsic limitations, which can be only overcome
by the adoption of a multi-modal or multi-algorithmic
approach.