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In recent years, biometric technology has been drawing widespread attention. Due to improvements in reliability, accuracy, safety and convenience, it is being adopted more readily by businesses and becoming part of our everyday lives.
To learn more about the background of the widening use and future of biometric authentication, we interviewed a well-known authority of this field, Professor Naohisa Komatsu of Waseda University and personnel from NEC, the world leader in biometric authentication technologies.
Komatsu: The use of biometric authentication technologies such as fingerprint systems was once limited to such fields as crime investigation. But awareness of biometric authentication rose dramatically since the U.S. terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Such systems are now widely employed in places like airports.
In our daily lives, passwords and smart cards are commonly used as means of personal identification. While convenient and easy to use, these authentication methods are not completely secure, because they are easy to lose and are prone to abuse. For example, people who steal or borrow passwords and cards can fake owners' identities and bypass security. Biometric authentication is drawing attention because it securely enables accurate personal identification with relative ease.
Mizoguchi: Biometric authentication is basically a system of identifying individuals through physical and behavioral traits. These traits can include fingerprints, veins, irises, faces, hand geometry, handwriting, voice and more. Fingerprint authentication, in particular, has been used in a wide range of fields because fingerprints are recognized as unique to each individual and unchangeable over time.
Komatsu: The public sector has broadly adopted biometric authentication because of advantages like high dependability, accuracy and safety. Now companies and individuals are using biometric authentication as well, due in part to increased awareness of its simplicity and convenience. For example, biometric authentication is gradually being used for ATMs, PC login, and physical access control. More and more, biometric authentication is entering into our everyday lives. The once-bulky systems continue to become smaller, which is contributing to their growing acceptance.
Mizoguchi: NEC fingerprint and face authentication technologies are contributing to fields like law enforcement, citizen identification and immigration control. These technologies are employed in more than 480 systems in 30 countries, and their usage is expected to enhance social security and other public services.
Businesses are finding fingerprint authentication useful not only for PC login, but also for monitoring PC usage, preventing unauthorized access, improving information security, and keeping records of employee work hours. Highly convenient biometric authentication is even employed in amusement parks for annual passes.
Komatsu: When it comes to fingerprint authentication, NEC is Japan's leader and pioneer. I highly respect the company's advanced technology and unparalleled expertise in dealing with latent prints. Their matching technology produces highly accurate results even when the fingerprints are faint or distorted. In future, I expect this technology will dramatically expand the use of fingerprint authentication in our everyday lives.
Hara: NEC boasts over 35 years of accumulated R&D know-how in fingerprint system technology. The performance of fingerprint authentication systems is largely determined by sensor-scanning, image-processing, and verification technologies, which have all been developed in-house by NEC. With its accumulated experience and expertise in the field, NEC leads the world in terms of patents on sensor and matching technologies. NEC systems were also ranked No. 1 at a matching accuracy evaluation conducted by an agency of the U.S. government.
Mizoguchi: People tend to overlook the wide-ranging variations that fingerprint authentication has to accommodate. For example, some people's fingers are dry, while others are sweaty. Fingerprint authentication also deal with different finger sizes, such as the narrow fingers of women and small fingers of children. Successfully handling such differences requires advanced sensor technology such as that developed by NEC, which realizes extremely clear and high-fidelity imaging.
By improving the sensor supply and production systems, NEC developed a high-precision fingerprint authentication unit that costs roughly 40% less compared to previous models. NEC has already begun shipping this product, PU900-10, to markets around the world, enabling people everywhere to casually use biometric authentication as part of their everyday lives.
Komatsu: The aging of Japanese society is accelerating, and the biometric authentication technology is expected to play more important roles in the aging society. I have great expectations that NEC, as a leading company in biometric authentication, will contribute to the realization of a safe, comfortable and convenient society.
Hara: NEC will utilize experience and know-how gained through years of fingerprint authentication research to focus on developing new technologies such as new algorithms that enable faster and more accurate matching.
Mizoguchi: NEC has also been conducting research and development on face authentication systems for more than 15 years. NEC plans to develop technologies such as multimodal systems that identify individuals through multiple physical and behavioral traits. Technologies such as these will enhance the convenience of biometric authentication and expand its usage to more situations in our everyday lives. NEC will continue leading the development of biometric authentication systems and contribute to the society through various activities including industrial standardizations.
