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History of Biometrics

• The biometric system is not new in this world. It was there, since the 14th century. At that period, China had introduced fingerprinting and had started taking fingerprints of its merchants and their children to distinguish them from all others. Fingerprinting has evolved since then.
• In the 19th century, a Scientist named Alphonse Bertillion discovered a system, i.e., measurements of the body of a person to identify them. It took the subject’s photograph and recorded height, the length of one foot, an arm, and index finger. He had acknowledged that some traits of the human body such as the length of the fingers remain unchanged concerning other physical characteristics such as length of hair, weight, etc., gets altered. This method disapproved quickly as the persons with same body measurements would be falsely taken as one. Hence, with the help of this research, a Scotland based scientist Richard Edward Henry discovered a new method of fingerprinting.
• The notion of retinal identification was first introduced by Dr. Carleton Simon and Dr. Isadore Goldstein in 1935. First face recognition paper was published in 1971 (Goldstein et al.).The research and development effort was put in at Eye Dentify Inc in 1976. The first commercial retina scanning system was developed in 1981.
• John Daugman introduced the early successful Iris recognition in 1993 at Cambridge University.
• FBI installed IAFIS in 2000 with a database of about 47 million prints; average of 50,000 searches per day; 15% of searches are in lights out mode and 2 hour response time for the criminal search.
• Biometrics Automated Toolset (BAT) was introduced in 2001, which provided an accurate identification technique.

Thus, at present biometrics has developed a concrete ground of study with precise technologies of identifying personality traits.

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