Embedded System for Biometric Identification

Biometrics refers to automatic identification of a person based on his or her physiological or behavioral characteristics which provide a reliable and secure user authentication for the increased security requirements of our personal information compared to traditional identification methods such as passwords and PINs (Jain et al., 2000). Organizations are looking to automate identity authentication systems to improve customer satisfaction and operating efficiency as well as to save critical resources due to the fact that identity fraud in welfare disbursements, credit card transactions, cellular phone calls, and ATM withdrawals totals over $6 billion each year (Jain et al., 1998). Furthermore, as people become more connected electronically, the ability to achieve a highly accurate automatic personal identification system is substantially more critical. Enormous change has occurred in the world of embedded systems driven by the advancement on the integrated circuit technology and the availability of open source. This has opened new challenges and development of advanced embedded system. This scenario is manifested in the appearance of sophisticated new products such as PDAs and cell phones and by the continual increase in the amount of resources that can be packed into a small form factor which requires significant high end skills and knowledge. More people are gearing up to acquire advanced skills and knowledge to keep abreast of the technologies to build advanced embedded system using available Single Board Computer (SBC) with 32 bit architectures.