PD ISO/IEC TR 24741 is a technical report that provides a tutorial on biometrics.
It contains a description of the architecture of biometric processes and of the processes themselves.
It includes further details of international standards' activity in the field of biometrics and the terms and definitions that are used in them.
“Biometric authentication” is the automatic recognition of individual persons based on distinguishing biological and behavioral traits. The field is a subset of the broader field of human identification science. Example technologies include fingerprinting, face recognition, hand geometry, speaker recognition, and iris recognition.
At the current level of technology, DNA analysis is a laboratory technique not fully automated and requiring human processing, so it is not considered “biometric authentication” under this definition (it is not currently automatic and fast, but may become so in the near future).
Some techniques (such as iris recognition) are more biologically based and some (such as signature recognition) are more behaviorally based, but all techniques are influenced by both behavioral and biological elements.
There are no purely “behavioral” or “biological” biometric systems.
Biometric authentication is frequently referred to as simply “biometrics”, although this latter word has historically been associated with the statistical analysis of general biological data.
The word “biometrics”, like “genetics”, is usually treated as singular. It first appeared in the vocabulary of physical and information security around 1980 as a substitute for the earlier descriptor “automatic personal identification”, in use in the 1970s. Biometric systems recognize “persons” by recognizing “bodies”.
The distinction between person and body is subtle but is of key importance in understanding the inherent capabilities and limitations of these technologies. In our context, biometrics deals with computer recognition of patterns created by human behaviors and biological structures and is usually associated more with the field of computer engineering and statistical pattern analysis than with the behavioral or biological sciences.
Today, biometrics is being used to recognize individuals in a wide variety of contexts, such as computer and physical access control, law enforcement, voting, border crossing, social benefit programs, and driver licensing.
Contents of PD ISO/IEC TR 24741 includes
ISO/IEC TR 24741:2007