Archive for the 'News' Category

It sounds crazy, but it was making a big splash in the papers not long ago.  Analysis of facial expressions could soon be used to detect whether somebody is about to commit a terrorist atrocity.

Students working on the system primarily plan to use it for human-machine interactions, by which robots would be able to detect and process human emotion.

With regards to the crime prevention aspect, graduate Abu Sayheed Sohail said “it could be used to identify suspicious movements, to draw a security agent’s attention and alert him or her to maybe take a more careful look at five or six of the people.”

Read more at Canada.com

eWeek.com has a great article on preventing fraud in financial institutions, with SocGen being the case in point, using biometric solutions.

From their conclusion:

To mitigate fraud, these banks and financial institutions need to supplement their internal controls compliance with biometric authentication. Biometrics will prevent data breaches of security

Read the rest of the article here.

It seems that terrorism is going to get more and more difficult - in part thanks to new automated systems in development at the University of Buffalo.

These systems would use a wide range of biometric identifiers including facial, voice and gait in order to determine the likelihood that a given person is about to commit an act of terrorism.

“The goal is to identify the perpetrator in a security setting before he or she has the chance to carry out the attack,” said Venu Govindaraju, Ph.D., professor of computer science and engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Govindaraju is co-principal investigator on the project with Mark G. Frank, Ph.D., associate professor of communication in the UB College of Arts and Sciences.

The project, recently awarded an $800,000 grant by the National Science Foundation, will focus on developing in real-time an accurate baseline of indicators specific to an individual during extensive interrogations while also providing real-time clues during faster, routine security screenings.

“We are developing a prototype that examines a video in a number of different security settings, automatically producing a single, integrated score of malfeasance likelihood,” he said.

Source

Hitachi, Ltd. today announced that it will begin the sale of its compact and contact less Finger Vein biometric authentication device and SDK. Full-scale availability and sales begin July in Europe, North America, Asia, Oceania and others. Hitachi developed the product based on the original model designed for the Japanese market and sold in Japan since October 2006. PC users can now guard against illegitimate access or leakage of information on their computers by using the vein patterns in their finger as the key to manage their computer login process. The finger vein unit has achieved its small size, high accuracy rate and low cost by employing a single-chip LSI design with this device.In addition, an SDK is available to allow for development of custom applications or integration into existing application environments.

Following several years of research and development of the finger vein pattern recognition technology at the Hitachi, Ltd., Central Research Institute in 1997, the company received a substantial number of patents. Because of the unique and “non-traceable” nature of the biometric technology, counterfeiting is not possible. Given the progress of today’s ubiquitous information society, the need for practical and accurate biometric solutions is growing at a fast pace. Finger vein pattern recognition meets effectively these demanding requirements and allows for the efficient deployment of biometric authentication devices for a variety of applications. Hitachi has now commercialized the operating system and various applications including PC login devices and validation devices for ATMs for various fields in Japan. The validation device for ATMs is fast becoming a de facto standard, with about 80 percent of the financial institutions in Japan adopting finger vein biometrics as of the end of March in 2007 (Based upon our independent ATM market analysis within Banking sector).

As adoption levels of finger vein pattern recognition increase in Japan, the level of interest in the overseas market is also increasing. To date, Hitachi is seeing sales increases of the device in Southeast Asia, including Singapore. In addition, growth potential is expected in the United States and Europe, particularly for access control and related applications. Hitachi recently installed a system at the Shinkin Central Bank, New York branch.

Hitachi increasingly is focusing its businesses on creating solutions to answer various market trends aiming at the achievement of a safe, comfortable, ubiquitous information society, exemplified by making finger vein technology the de facto standard for high-security biometrics.

Biometric technologies company Cross Match Technologies Inc. expects to raise $114.2 million after expenses from its portion of an initial public offering totaling 11.8 million shares, according to a regulatory filing on Wednesday.In the Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Cross Match said it expects the offering to price between $14 and $16 per share.

Cross Match will sell 8.3 million shares of the total offering. Smiths Group plc, a maker of airport x-ray machines, and former Cross Match Chairman Theodore Johnson will sell the remaining 3.5 million.

Cross Match plans to list its shares on the Nasdaq Stock Market under the symbol “CROS.”
Source: Forbes