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Lack of Standards Slows Adoption
Large companies are waiting for interoperability
Terry Costlow -- Design News, June 1, 2003
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Linking fingers to brains: The BioAPI standard provides a common link between the incoming biometric templates and the host operating system. |
Newton, MA — Newton, MA—Driven by security concerns in several fields, biometric technologies such as fingerprint sensing and facial recognition are taking off after a lengthy development period. The emergence of standards has helped facilitate acceptance, but there's still plenty of debate over whether the right standards are ready, and whether or not they will actually be used by the many diverse vendors in the field.
Security ranging from entry at airports and nuclear plants down to preventing unauthorized usage of PDAs, cell phones, and PCs has helped open up the market for fingerprint sensors, facial recognition and iris-scan systems, and other biometric technologies.
Biometrics have had a slower market ramp-up than was expected in the late 1990s, and some blame a lack of standards as a contributing factor. There's still a perception that the field is still heavily proprietary. Proponents are trying to counteract that image. "The impression that there are no standards in biometrics is just not correct," says Richard Norton, executive director of the International Biometrics Industry Association (IBIA, www.ibia.org)
One of the most sucessful is the BioAPI standard, created by a consortium that included Intel, IBM, and Novell, and approved by ANSI. It provides hooks to link the sensors to an operating system. "Adoption is picking up. I'm aware of 15 to 20 products that are BioAPI compliant," says Catherine J. Tilton, who chairs the BioAPI consortium. "For a relatively young industry, we're far ahead of the curve" in creating standards, says Tilton, who is also director of SAFLINK Corp.'s Integrated Solutions Group (Reston, VA, www.saflink.com). There are so many biometric standards in the works that she takes care to add that agencies are coordinating with each other.
Half full
Other observers note that whether the necessary standards are in place depends on which aspect of the broad biometric field is being discussed. Though some cite the success of BioAPI, at least one industry leader disagrees with that analysis. "Nobody's really using it," says Dale Setlak, CTO at Melbourne, FL-based AuthenTec (www.authentec.com). He adds, "Many of the standards are driving a lot of cost into the systems," which is deadly in mass-market products like PCs, PDAs, and cell phones.
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Knowing Touch: The market for sensor chips from AuthenTec and others will grow as standards emerge. |
The need for standards depends in part on the application and size of the customer. "Large system integrators are all curious about standards, while smaller customers who want turnkey systems to replace physical keys don't care about standards," says Doug McArthur, director of biometrics IC technology at Fujitsu Microelectronics America (Sunnyvale, CA, www.fujitsumicro.com).
Many biometric companies are currently quite happy serving smaller customers, but the real volumes for this nascent industry will come from large corporations that talk in terms of millions of customers instead of hundreds. The biometrics industry has developed several standards in the past couple years, working with groups such as the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).
However, in the fingerprint industry—currently the largest segment within biometrics—there's presently no way for a large corporation to enroll people using one manufacturer's sensor to record the personal data and switch to another manufacturer's hardware later. "In supermarket point of sale, kiosks, and ATMs, this is a big issue. Without a standard, all their customers would have to be re-enrolled if the company decides to switch vendors a few years down the road. They can't accept that," says Maxine Most, president of Acuity Market Intelligence (www.biometricsmi.com)
The International Committee for Information Technology Standards has set up a biometrics committee, M1, which is working on four areas. They will make it much simpler to move fingerprint templates from one company's hardware to another.
Even sensor developers who don't use other standards are bullish on M1. "That's the missing piece," says AuthenTec's Setlak. The standard doesn't add much in cost, and it addresses a number of marketplace needs. For example, "Say a company like IBM or HP enrolls people for a corporate program, then wants to give them laptops with a different fingerprint sensor. This lets them do that," he continues.
