A wide variety of systems requires reliable personal recognition schemes to either confirm or determine the identity of an individual requesting the services. The purpose of such schemes is to ensure, that the rendered services are accessed only by a legitimate user and not anyone else. Biometrics refers to the automatic recognition of an individual based on their physiological and/or behavioral characteristics. In this paper we give a brief overview of the field of biometrics and summarize the technologies used, application areas and performance measures.

biometrics, behavioural, fingerprint, iris, retina, template, security.