The skin on our palms and feet has a pattern of interlaced ridges and valleys. These ridges, called friction ridges are unique for each finger, enabling their use as a tool of identification. Given the world population of about 6.7 billion, there are 67 billion different fingerprint patterns! Even identical twins can be differentiated based on their fingerprints. Superficial injury on the finger surface only changes the pattern in the local region temporarily; ridge structure reappears after the injury heals. It is the uniqueness and persistence of fingerprint patterns that have made them a major tool for person identification in law enforcement agencies worldwide for over one hundred years. Rising concerns related to national security and financial safety (anti-terrorist, computer logon, financial transactions) have resulted in an increased reliance on fingerprint recognition in government and commercial applications. Fingerprint is the preferred biometric in these applications compared to other biometrics (face, iris and voice) because of its proven performance, large existing databases and compact and low cost fingerprint sensors. The wide adoption of fingerprint recognition technology in many sectors of our society has caused concerns about their recognition accuracy, uniqueness, system security, and user privacy. This talk will provide a brief introduction to fingerprint recognition, emerging applications and research challenges.

Biography

Prof. Anil K. Jain is a University Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Computer Science & Engineering, and Electrical & Computer Engineering at Michigan State University. He received a B.Tech. from IIT, Kanpur (1969) and Ph.D. from Ohio State University (1973). His research interests include pattern recognition, computer vision and biometric recognition. His articles on biometrics have appeared in Scientific American, Nature, IEEE Spectrum, Comm. ACM, IEEE Computer, Proc. IEEE, Encarta, Scholarpedia, and MIT Technology Review. 

He has received a number of awards, including Guggenheim fellowship, Humboldt Research award, Fulbright fellowship, IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement award (2003), W. Wallace McDowell award (2007), IAPR King-Sun Fu Prize (2008), and ICDM 2008 Research Contribution Award for contributions to pattern recognition and biometrics. He also received the best paper awards from the IEEE Trans. Neural Networks (1996) and the Pattern Recognition journal (1987, 1991, 2005). He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (1991-1994). He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, AAAS, IAPR and SPIE.  

Holder of six patents in the area of fingerprints (transferred to IBM in 1999), he is the author of several books: Handbook of Biometrics (2007), Handbook of Multibiometrics (2006), Handbook of Face Recognition (2005), Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition (2003) (received the PSP award from the Association of American Publishers), Markov Random Fields: Theory and Applications (1993), and Algorithms For Clustering Data (1988). ISI has designated him as a highly cited researcher (his h-index is 58). According to CiteSeer, his book, Algorithms for Clustering Data is ranked # 91 in the Most Cited Articles in Computer Science (over all times) and his paper "Data Clustering: A Review" (ACM Computing Surveys, 1999) is consistently ranked in the Top 10 Most Popular Magazine and Computing Survey Articles Downloaded.

He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. Information Forensics and Security and ACM Trans. Knowledge Discovery in Data. He is a member of the Defense Science Board Summer study on Capability Surprise and The National Academies committees on Whither Biometrics and Improvised Explosive Devices. He has been nominated to the Defense Science Board.