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'Something in the way she moves': Will dynamic biometrics be the next ID?

April 24, 2012

EU researchers are studying how an individual's walk, hand movements or pulse can be used as biometric identification. An article at sciencedaily.com said a project partly funded by the EU called "Unobtrusive authentication using activity related and soft biometrics," or "Actbio" for short, will examine whether these and other dynamic features could be employed for user verification purposes.

Actibio project coordinator, Dr. Dimitrios Tzovaras, said in the Science Daily article that using dynamic feature technology alongside face recognition could enhance security in banks and ATMs. Faces could be scanned at the ATM or the counter — the way someone approached the machine or teller window could also be observed, to provide an additional identification factor.

While dynamic technology has an error rate of three percent on its own, the combination of dynamic information and static information such as face recognition can drop the error rate to zero, Tzovaras told Science Daily.

The biometric systems would have to be "trained" to recognize individual traits in a controlled environment using image analysis software under controlled conditions, so even if it works, the question remains whether it's practical in the real world.

For more on this topic, visit our security research center.