A Smart Identification Card System Using Facial Biometric: From Architecture to Application

This paper presents a smart identification card system using facial biometric information for identity authentification. For a trade-off between the security and the cost, this system utilizes an architecture containing three security levels of identity authentification, “manual face verification offline”, “manual face verification online” and “automatic (biometric) face verification”, which satisfy the different security requirements of various applications of identification cards. For the function of “manual face verification online”, we bring out an idea based on decomposing the face image into two parts which are stocked into the card and the database of system respectively. And for the function of “automatic face verification”, we proposed a novel face verification scheme based on class-specific face models. The technique Active Appearance Model is applied, as the way of face modelling, to realize the proposed scheme. A prototype application of such system, which contains a fix version for PC and a mobile version for Pocket PC, is also introduced in this paper.