Associated Utilities

Abstract

This chapter will be of particular interest to those studying biometrics at a deeper level, and it references freely available utilities in order to demonstrate key technical factors associated with biometric identity verification. The utilities may be downloaded from the Biometrics Research website and it is recommended that readers do so, in order to work through the illustrations provided in this chapter. The Biometric Performance Simulator demonstrates why equivalence of realised performance across operational nodes is important and uses a derivative of the APEX methodology to demonstrate this in practice. The Biometric Transaction Variability Simulator demonstrates the effects of altering the matching threshold at a single point of presence, thus affecting potentially large numbers of users while taking no account of individual variation. The Template and Threshold Analyser demonstrates how an alternative matching methodology, in this case the Proximity Matching Method, can provide significantly more accurate results with fewer matching errors. It illustrates the inherent weakness with fixed matching thresholds, as used in the vast majority of applications. The User Psychology Index wizard provides an intuitive and informative way of analysing the effects of user psychology upon realised performance. It uses both conventional performance metrics and a newly introduced metric which makes comparisons of operational scenarios much easier. Together, these utilities provide a practical and intuitive educational method in order to promote a deeper understanding of biometric technology.