You live in a big city. Each day after work you pick up your kid from a large kindergarten. One day you got the flu. You call your father and ask him to pick up his grandchild. He agrees to do it. But… will the kindergarten release the kid? How could they be sure that this is an “authentic” grandfather?
Dr. Sébastien Marcel and his team at Idiap Research Institute are working on MOBIO (Mobile Biometry), a European research project. They assure that reliable communication between the kindergarten and yourself can effectively be done using mobile authentication.
The conventional means of identification (passwords, PINs, secret codes) can be forgotten, shared or stolen. Therefore we a need to develop a higher level of reliability in determining somebody’s identity. This can only be achieved through the use of biometrics. Although, we don’t have to bother that we’d need an additional machinery in our suitcases. Biometric authentication applications can be embedded in our mobile phones. And they will easily provide us with biometric person authentication systems including face, voice and speaker recognition.
One of the first face recognition system has been already implemented on mobile phones such as iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS, Nokia N900, Nokia N93i, Nokia N95, Nokia N810. Nevertheless, MOBIO team doesn’t stop at this point and would like to consider new scenarios. Therefore, directly from companies and vendors in mobile identity market, they are calling for new cooperators and innovational use cases.
