Authentication and Identification: Biometrics

Question 1

What is FMR?

Answer 1

False-Match-Rate

The rate at which a biometric process mismatches biometric signals from two distinct individuals as coming from the same individual

Question 2

What is FAR?

Answer 2

False Accept Rate
What percentage of times an invalid user is accepted by the system.

FAR = FMR * (1 - FTA)

NB: NOT the same as FMR

Question 3

What is FNMR?

Answer 3

False-Non-Match-Rate

The rate at which a biometric matcher miscategorizes two captures from the same individual as being from different individuals

Question 4

What is FRR?

Answer 4

False Reject Rate
The likelihood that the biometric security system will incorrectly reject an access attempt by an authorized user.

FRR = FTA + FNMR * (1-FTA)

NB: NOT the same as FNMR

Question 5

What is EER?

Answer 5

Equal Error Rate
Point where FMR = FNMR

Question 6

What is FTA?

Answer 6

Failure to Acquire rate
The rate at which a biometric system fails to detect, identify or acquire a biometric iamge or signal of adequate quality

Question 7

What are minutiae and why are they used for fingerprint recognition?

Answer 7

Minutiae represents special points on a scanned fingerprint representing some sort of ridge discontinuation. Examples may be ridges cross one another, where one ridge forks into two ridges, or merely where a ridge ends.

A ridge is one of the elevated lines of a fingerprint and will be the black lines on a scan.

Minutiae are much easier to work with than whole images and requires much less computational power. By comparing the extracted minutiae to the reference image. These features are represented as vectors and compared. The retrieved comparison score will be used to verify the identity claim.