Biometric Technology: A Brief History

The technology industry has done so much to make people’s lives better and we see its by-products in almost everywhere we go, in every turn we do. One thing that many companies benefit from the gift of technology today is the use of modern biometric. Gone are the days of manual checking of employees clocking in and out because of these high-tech scanners. The biometric technology of today paved the worldwide use of the digital wallet, as well as fido2 passwordless authentication for cryptography security.

In this article, let us have a trip down memory lane of the biometric technology’s brief history.

The Exploration and Funding Years

 One of the breakthrough inventions during the 1960s was voice recognition and automated fingerprint identification. By 1975, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) funded these first prototyped inventions to extracts fingerprint points. However, digital storage costs much. For this reason, the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) had to improve the invention’s algorithm.

NIST’s work led to a system that produced smaller image sets, advanced speech, ocular, and facial recognition.

Biometric Science Takes Off

 With this advancement in the 1990s, the Biometric Consortium formed by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies like The Department of Defence (DoD) worked with the Defense Advanced Research Products Agency (DARPA) to support the use of face recognition algorithms in commercial markets—production then followed.

With this advancement, a digital storage—CODIS—was built by Lockheed Martin for the FBI. Aside from capacity, CODIS also does the searching and retrieval of DNA markers. However, the electronic mass exchange of data markers took hours; this then gave way to a new network to help facilitate the data exchange better.

Biometric Tech Rollout

 Different agencies and organizations began to create and promote collaborative exchange on the research and development of biometrics. Universities started to offer courses on biometric systems, while the global acceptance of face recognition as a biometric authenticator for passports and MRTDs or Machine Readable Travel Documents became a big help in the tourism industry and national security.

Eventually, the advancement of biometric technology made its way from state usage to the smartphones of today. Read more about these advancements through LoginID.

Biometric Technology: a brief history