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.”

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