FROM ENGADGET

AIRPrint performs ranged fingerprint scanning, won't let the terrorists win
By Michael Gorman  posted Jan 18th 2011 7:12AM

While ears may be the new biometric du jour, Advanced Optical Systems (AOS) is doing its best to keep fingerprints as the preferred method for identifying enemies of the state. The company has built a fingerprint scanner with the ability to accurately read a print up to two meters away, and our military views the system as a means to reduce the risk to soldiers at security checkpoints all over the world. The AIRPrint system is a significant upgrade over previous biometric security systems because it allows a person's identity to be confirmed by military personnel from behind the safety of a blast wall or armored vehicle, which keeps our serviceman out of harm's way. AIRPrint uses a source of polarized light and two 1.3 megapixel cameras (one to receive vertically polarized light and another to receive horizontally polarized light) in order to produce an accurate fingerprint. The prototype is able to scan and verify a print in under five seconds, but the device can presently only process one finger at a time, and that finger must stay a fixed distance from the cameras to get a precise reading. Despite these current limitations, AOS claims that soon the equipment will be capable of reading five prints simultaneously while a person is moving toward or away from the device. The system will be ready for market in the third quarter of this year, which is bad news for terrorists and soccer hooligans, but a windfall for Big Brother.

FROM FAST COMPANY


Eyeball This: Biometrics That Track The Way You See

What if you could be recognized by the way your eyes moved? An Israeli company believes that tracking the unique signatures in the movement of your eyeballs could be the most foolproof biometric system ever. What's more, its setup could be used as a lie detector, or a drug and alcohol test.

In ID-U Biometrics' system, the user has to watch a moving object onscreen, while the camera observes the motion of their eyes. Since the way our eyes move is based on a combination of factors --such as anatomy, physiology, behavioral characteristics, eye structure--it's a signature that simply can't be duplicated or forged, according to its developers.

Dr. Daphna Palti-Wasserman, CEO of ID-U Biometrics, says she designed the system by drawing up a wish list for the ultimate identification technology. "We explored the possible human signals and mechanisms that could deliver our dream biometrics," she told Fast Company. "It brought us to the visual system and to the dynamic approach."

This approach differs radically from eye-related biometrics we've written about previously, such as iris scanning. Iris scanning systems rely on matching the image of your iris structure with a stored pattern of your iris. In contrast, the pattern the ID-U technology is based on consists of dynamic movements made by your eyes as they track a target, something that cannot be controlled or learned. "Most of the eye movement components are involuntary, and we are not aware of them at all," says Palti-Wasserman.

The system requires only a screen, a camera and the ID-U software to obtain the identification signature. It can authenticate the user in as little as four to fifteen seconds and has a two percent error rate. Since it requires no specialized hardware, it can be easily deployed across a variety of platforms from homeland security applications to ATM transactions. It could one day replace conventional passwords in smartphones and PCs.


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FROM FAST COMPANY

Visa to Use Your Phone's Location to Prevent Credit Card Fraud

Sure, you like all the great benefits of having your phone know where you are. Looking up directions or local weather information becomes that much faster. But outside companies and agencies are equally delighted to have access to your location information--and not just to send you coupons. Increasingly, they’re going to be using that information for purposes that have nothing to do with your convenience and fancy.

Some of those purposes you’ll like. Others you might not be so keen about. One you’ll probably be okay with was just announced by Visa Europe. The credit card company is going to start using information about the location of customers’ mobile phones to prevent credit card fraud.
Visa Europe has partnered with a company called ValidSoft that can establish whether your mobile phone is in the same place as the merchant or ATM where your card is being used. The assumption is that if the two devices are in close proximity, it’s probably you using the card, even if you’re far afield from your usual stomping grounds. If the two devices are not in the same place, the system may send up an alert.

Proximity information will only be one of a number of variables the system will use to assess the likelihood of fraud during any particular transaction. The companies say the system will both reduce card misuse and cut down on the number of “false positives.” That, they say, will create a better experience for users when a particular purchase deviates from their expected patterns--no more annoying calls or locking your card up when you're simply on vacation--and it will cut down on case-management processing costs for card issuers.


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FROM PHYSORG

GPS not working? A shoe radar may help you find your way
December 1, 2010


(PhysOrg.com) -- The prevalence of global positioning system (GPS) devices in everything from cars to cell phones has almost made getting lost a thing of the past. But what do you do when your GPS isn’t working? Researchers from North Carolina State University and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have developed a shoe-embedded radar system that may help you find your way.

There are situations where GPS is unavailable, such as when you’re in a building, underground or in places where a satellite connection can be blocked by tall buildings or other objects,” says Dr. Dan Stancil, co-author of a paper describing the research and professor and head of NC State’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “So what do you do without satellites?”
One solution is to use inertial measurement units (IMUs), which are electronic devices that measure the forces created by acceleration (and deceleration) to determine how quickly you are moving and how far you have moved. The technology works in conjunction with GPS, with the IMU tracking your movement after you lose a GPS signal – and ultimately providing you with location data relevant to your last known location via GPS. For example, if you entered a cave and lost your GPS signal, you could use the IMU to retrace your steps to the last known GPS location and find your way back out.


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From technology Review
For Your Eyes Only
Everyone has a unique pattern of eye movements. A new biometric security system exploits this for a simple, hard-to-fool approach.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2010BY DUNCAN GRAHAM-ROWE E-mail Audio » Print
The way you view the world is unique, so why not use it to identify you?

A company in Israel has developed a security system that does just this--exploiting a person's unique pattern of eye movements to identify them. Most biometric security systems measure physical features that are constant, such as fingerprints or iris patterns. An eye-tracking system has the potential to be harder to fool and easier use, its creators say.

The new system tracks the way a person's eye moves as he watches an icon roam around a computer screen. The way the icon moves can be different every time, but the user's eye movements include "kinetic features"—slight variations in trajectory—that are unique, making it possible to identify him. This is less complicated than using a long pass phrase or a smart card to gain access to a computer system or a building.

"The interface is really very simple," says Daphna Palti-Wasserman, CEO of ID-U Biometrics, the company that developed the technology. "The user watches a target moving on a screen and a camera monitors their eye movement responses."

Eye tracking also requires no specialist hardware, other than a camera and a display, so it is cheaper and easier to deploy, Palti-Wasserman says. Using a standard video camera, the system can identify users with an accuracy of 97 percent, she says. Many cell phones and laptops already have this kind of hardware, so ID-U's system could be deployed widely for both desktop and mobile computing. The company is currently working on an app for the iPhone 4.

Other biometric systems can be fooled by a very accurate copy of, for example, a fingerprint or retina. This new system uses a biometric pattern that's very hard to copy, Palti-Wasserman says. "What we're doing is a challenge-response sequence," she says. "The whole process depends on what is being shown on the screen," she says.

Kevin Bowyer, a biometrics expert at the University of Notre Dame, notes that some voice, keystroke, and handwriting-based security systems already use a challenge-response approach. "The main advantage is to control the situation more in order to get better information and improve the confidence in your results," he says.

ID-U's system moves an icon across a screen in a way that elicits about a dozen distinct characteristics as the viewer's eyes move. These tiny movements are sampled 30 times a second. "When the target jumps, it activates specific mechanisms of eye movement, but when it moves smoothly or slowly, different mechanisms are activated," says Palti-Wasserman. ID-U will not reveal precisely which metrics its system uses, but Palti-Wasserman says it is analogous to watching the trajectories of two different people driving around the same track—they follow the same route, but there will be distinct differences.

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FROM WIRED SHILLS
Handheld Radar Senses Life Behind the Wall

Pretty please, with sugar on top, don’t call it seeing through walls. That shorthand — with its connotations of the First Earth Battalion trying to phase through brick — gets Army engineers gritting their teeth. Instead, this cream-colored handheld senses through the wall, seeing if any live human being is behind it before a squad kicks down the door to see for itself.

At least that’s how Douglas Graham explains the AN/PPS-26 STTW (“Sense Through The Wall,” get it?) device, which looks a like a cross between a gas-meter reader and an ’80s video game console. Graham, a spokesman for Program Executive Office Soldier — the Army office that develops everything soldiers wear or carry — hoists the maybe-five-pound plastic device in his right hand and clicks a button with his index finger to turn it on. He places it up to one of the hundreds of plastic barriers that separate the display stands for exhibitors at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington.

A tiny screen above Graham’s hand lights up with a spider’s-web display, calculating positioning by degrees above the STTW and distance from it, measured in five-meter intervals. With his thumb, Graham clicks the other button on the device, firing off a radar that detects  motion on the opposite side of the barrier. Suddenly, the display shows yellow dots flitting from place to place. Those are people, evidently getting bored by whatever weapons display the kiosk hosts.

PEO Soldier recently awarded Raytheon and L3 two multi-million dollar contracts to build 30 STTW units so testing on them can begin. “Imagine the physical wear and tear if you’re knocking down doors and you don’t know if someone is behind them,” Graham says.

Probably a relief. But it doesn’t exactly make the wall functionally transparent, a long-standing goal of the Pentagon’s Darpa researchers. there’s a lot that the STTW doesn’t do.

For one thing, it can’t sense through metal. If a potential adversary is hiding in any kind of metal structure, the STTW won’t know it. And even when placed against “wood-framed houses, mud or adobe,” the buildings STTW can sense through, a wall thickness of more than eight inches will throw the device off.


Read More http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/10/handheld-radar-senses-life-behind-the-wall/#ixzz13cEi8Y3S

FROM PHYSORG

Electronic searching aid for parents October 1, 2010

Just a short call and the "Kidfinder" lets you know where your child is right now via SMS. It can be built into a game console and the locating unit even combines GPS position fixing with GSM tracking. In the best-case scenario, it can even locate the person sought within a couple of meters.


Now where’s that Toby? The eight-year-old was supposed to be homehalf an hour ago. Not to worry. His mother goes to her phone, calls her son’s “Kidfinder”, gives her password and gets an SMS with Toby’s position data. She can see from the coordinates that her youngest child has taken a little detour to the brook and while playing in the water he forgot what time it is. The Kidfinder is different from exclusive cell phone locating systems because it not only uses the GSM grid (global system for mobile communications) for mobile radio, but also the global positioning system (GPS) for determining Toby’s position.

Carsten Hoherz from the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration in Berlin, Germany, explains that “This combination of GSM and GPS provides reliable localization regardless of whether the person sought is outside or inside of a building.” If the child is on the move outside, it can determine his or her position via GPS to as little as five meters. GPS position fixing with several satellites works with substantially greater precision than localization via GSM because it only gives away what mobile radio cell a user is in at the present moment. On the other hand, mobile radio reception is only possible inside of buildings while GPS signals generally cannot penetrate through walls or the roof. This is the reason why GPS localization precision drops dramatically in urban jungles because of signal reflecting.

Originally, the scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration came up with their  pocket-sized GSM/GPS system to localize freight or cars. These units have the same technology for these applications. On the one hand, they are somewhat larger and heavier, which means that they have more space for higher-performance antennas and storage batteries. On the other hand, the developers ran up against certain limits with the Kidfinder because they did not want them to be too heavy for kids so that they would carry them voluntarily. This is why they came up with the idea of combining the locating unit with a portable game console because, as Hoherz explains, “Children prefer carrying something like that around with them to  some extra piece of equipment that isn’t of any use to them.” Kidfinder is not much bigger than an open matchbox and weighs less than 80 grams. It’s a real lightweight and fits perfectly into the spare slot of your common or garden-variety game console. What’s more, its storage battery has a capacity of 400 mAh which is enough for two days of operation. Finally, it can be charged with the console. The localization module offers the option of expanding the scope of the console’s function by providing local information for ground games.


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