Biometrics?

[ffutures]

We're doing our one-day forensic science thing again in a couple of weeks, and are planning to add a couple of weeks of forensics material to our syllabus next year.

It's probably too late for the one-day event, but one thing we'd like to cover in the future, but don't really know much about, is biometrics.

What we'd ideally like to do is demonstrate face recognition software, from e.g. a webcam, and at least one other type of biometric identification. The obvious candidate is fingerprints since we already use a fingerprint password system in the school library. The snag is that a password system isn't really very transparent; you can't see what it's doing or why. What'd be much better is something like a fingerprint scanner that did all the CSI stuff - showed the print on screen, showed finding the ridges, then reduced everything to a numerical formula.

The snag, of course, is that I can't seem to find anything like this for sale, we don't have much money, and our PCs probably aren't nearly powerful enough anyway.

So does anyone know of anything suitable that'll run on 500mhz Windows XP boxes and isn't ludicrously expensive?

Comments

[thecynic1.livejournal.com]

You might want to look at Hand Geometry. It's probably the easiest type of biometrics to demonstrate, at least up to the point of entering the data into a proprietary data base. Don't know if this is what you're looking for but you can look at these sources:

http://biometrics.cse.msu.edu/hand_geometry.html

http://biometrics.cse.msu.edu/hand_proto.html

http://ctl.ncsc.dni.us/biomet%20web/BMHand.html

http://www.hrsltd.com/identification_technology/hand_recognition.php interesting because it is based in UK

http://www.genesisresource.com/index2.htm?rsi/handgeometry.htm~main with flash video showing off the equipment

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks - I'll check it out.

From those nice people in Cheltenham

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

http://www.cesg.gov.uk/site/ast/index.cfm?menuSelected=4&displayPage=4

Which leads to some interesting Acrobat files.

Re: From those nice people in Cheltenham

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks!