Last week, there was an item on EnterpriseMobileToday titled “Smartphones to Get Biometric Identity Platform for Mobile Security". For a brief moment, I was excited about the prospect of voice biometrics playing a major role in this rapidly expanding market. Unfortunately, my hopes were dashed as soon as I started reading the article and learned that the biometric the title referred to was "fingerprint recognition".
Now I have nothing against fingers; I have ten of them myself. It’s just that voice biometrics seems like such a natural choice for a device that has a microphone and speaker. As a matter of fact, in March I blogged about the feasibility of securing smartphones with voice biometrics. This is a golden opportunity and I hope the voice biometrics industry is able to deliver a robust solution before it’s too late.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Old MacDonald Had a Farm…with Voice Biometrics
A recent article on TMCnet.com described how some farmers in India are using voice biometrics to manage contract farming without being physically present.
According to the item, “farmers make a call to their organization's central "Voice ERP" system and feed in information they want to share with tillers. The information gets stored in the database and gets converted into text. The system then generates an SMS, which is sent to the mobile phones of the tillers.” The article goes on to say that “farmers are provided unique identity codes to ensure only authorized people access an organization's Voice ERP database. For additional security, a voice biometrics check can also be performed.”
The "Voice ERP" system is provided by Uniphore Software Systems.
According to the item, “farmers make a call to their organization's central "Voice ERP" system and feed in information they want to share with tillers. The information gets stored in the database and gets converted into text. The system then generates an SMS, which is sent to the mobile phones of the tillers.” The article goes on to say that “farmers are provided unique identity codes to ensure only authorized people access an organization's Voice ERP database. For additional security, a voice biometrics check can also be performed.”
The "Voice ERP" system is provided by Uniphore Software Systems.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
PerSay Wins 2010 Speech Industry Award
Congratulations to Persay for winning the 2010 Speech Industry Award for Speech Security. Other recipients in the category included: Leaders: Agnitio and Raytheon/BBN; Vendor Contender: Loquendo.
The Speech Industry Awards are handed out each year by Speech Technology magazine. According to the magazine's website, "recipients were determined through an extensive process and proprietary rating formula that involves collecting industry analyst and consultant reviews, financial and corporate information, product and functionality assessments, and scores based on their importance to current and potential customers."
PerSay Ltd., with offices in Tel-Aviv, Israel and New York, is a provider of voice biometrics products.
The Speech Industry Awards are handed out each year by Speech Technology magazine. According to the magazine's website, "recipients were determined through an extensive process and proprietary rating formula that involves collecting industry analyst and consultant reviews, financial and corporate information, product and functionality assessments, and scores based on their importance to current and potential customers."
PerSay Ltd., with offices in Tel-Aviv, Israel and New York, is a provider of voice biometrics products.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Tongueprints to verify identity?
An item in “Security World News” describes research being conducted at Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Biometrics Research Center on the use of tongue scanning to identify individuals. “The tongue shapes of different people are different, and thus the tongue can be used to tell different subjects (apart),” says Lei Zhang, assistant professor at the university.
Here’s the abstract of Professor Lei Zhang’s research paper:
“Biometrics, which use human physiological or behavioral features for personal identification, currently face the challenge of designing a secure biometric system that will accept only the legitimate presentation of the biometric identifiers without being fooled by the doctored or spoofed measurements that are input into the system. More biometric traits are required for improving the performance of authentication systems. In this paper, we present a new number for the biometrics family, i.e. tongueprint, which uses particularly interesting properties of the human tongue to base a technology for noninvasive biometric assessment. The tongue is a unique organ which can be stuck out of the mouth for inspection, whose appearance is amenable to examination with the aid of a machine vision system. Yet it is otherwise well protected in the mouth and difficult to be forged. Furthermore, the involuntary squirm of the tongue is not only a convincing proof that the subject is alive, but also a feature for recognition. That is to say, the tongue can present both static features and dynamic features for authentication. However, little work has hitherto been done on the tongue as a biometric identifier. In this work, we make use of a database of tongue images obtained over a long period to examine the performance of the tongueprint as a biometric identifier. Our research shows that tongueprint is a promising candidate for biometric identification and worthy of further research.”
What's next?
Here’s the abstract of Professor Lei Zhang’s research paper:
“Biometrics, which use human physiological or behavioral features for personal identification, currently face the challenge of designing a secure biometric system that will accept only the legitimate presentation of the biometric identifiers without being fooled by the doctored or spoofed measurements that are input into the system. More biometric traits are required for improving the performance of authentication systems. In this paper, we present a new number for the biometrics family, i.e. tongueprint, which uses particularly interesting properties of the human tongue to base a technology for noninvasive biometric assessment. The tongue is a unique organ which can be stuck out of the mouth for inspection, whose appearance is amenable to examination with the aid of a machine vision system. Yet it is otherwise well protected in the mouth and difficult to be forged. Furthermore, the involuntary squirm of the tongue is not only a convincing proof that the subject is alive, but also a feature for recognition. That is to say, the tongue can present both static features and dynamic features for authentication. However, little work has hitherto been done on the tongue as a biometric identifier. In this work, we make use of a database of tongue images obtained over a long period to examine the performance of the tongueprint as a biometric identifier. Our research shows that tongueprint is a promising candidate for biometric identification and worthy of further research.”
What's next?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
