Biometric Applications- Speech Recognition

The speaker-specific characteristics of speech are due to differences in physiological and behavioral aspects of the speech production system in humans. The main physiological aspect of the human speech production system is the vocal tract shape. The vocal tract is generally considered as the speech production organ above the vocal folds, which consists of the following: (i) laryngeal pharynx (beneath the epiglottis), (ii) oral pharynx (behind the tongue, between the epiglottis and velum), (iii) oral cavity (forward of the velum and bounded by the lips, tongue, and palate), (iv) nasal pharynx (above the velum, rear end of nasal cavity), and (v) nasal cavity (above the palate and extending from the pharynx to the nostrils). The shaded area in the following figure depicts the vocal tract.
The vocal tract modifies the spectral content of an acoustic wave as it passes through it, thereby producing speech. Hence, it is common in speaker verification systems to make use of features derived only from the vocal tract. In order to characterize the features of the vocal tract, the human speech production mechanism is represented as a discrete-time system of the form depicted in following figure.

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Biometric Applications - FINGERPRINT MATCHING

Biometrics is a rapidly evolving technology, which has been widely used in forensics such as criminal identification and prison security. Recent advancements in biometric sensors and matching algorithms have led to the deployment of biometric authentication in a large number of civilian applications. Biometrics can be used to prevent unauthorized access to ATMs, cellular phones, smart cards, desktop PCs, workstations, and computer networks. It can be used during transactions conducted via telephone and Internet (electronic commerce and electronic banking). In automobiles, biometrics can replace keys with key-less entry and key-less ignition.
FINGERPRINT MATCHING:
Among all the biometric techniques, fingerprint-based identification is the oldest method, which has been successfully used in numerous applications. Everyone is known to have unique, immutable fingerprints. A fingerprint is made of a series of ridges and furrows on the surface of the finger. The uniqueness of a fingerprint can be determined by the pattern of ridges and furrows as well as the minutiae points. Minutiae points are local ridge characteristics that occur at either a ridge bifurcation or a ridge ending. Fingerprint matching techniques can be placed into two categories:
· Minutiae-based
· Correlation based.

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BIOMETRICS

Biometrics is automated methods of recognizing a person based on a physiological or behavioral characteristic. Among the features measured are; face, fingerprints, hand geometry, handwriting, iris, retinal, vein, and voice. Biometric technologies are becoming the foundation of an extensive array of highly secure identification and personal verification solutions. As the level of security breaches and transaction fraud increases, the need for highly secure identification and personal verification technologies is becoming apparent.
Biometric-based authentication applications include workstation, network, and domain access, single sign-on, application log on, data protection, remote access to resources, transaction security and Web security. Trust in these electronic transactions is essential to the healthy growth of the global economy. Utilized alone or integrated with other technologies such as smart cards, encryption keys and digital signatures, biometrics are set to pervade nearly all aspects of the economy and our daily lives. Utilizing biometrics for personal authentication is becoming convenient and considerably more accurate than current methods (such as the utilization of passwords or PINs). This is because biometrics links the event to a particular individual (a password or token may be used by someone other than the authorized user), is convenient (nothing to carry or remember), accurate (it provides for positive authentication), can provide an audit trail and is becoming socially acceptable and inexpensive.

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ADVANTAGES OF FIBER CABLES OVER WIRES

There are various advantages, which make Optical Fibres better than Copper systems. The crucial operating difference between a fibre optic communication system and other types is that signals are transmitted as light. Conventional electronic communication relies on electrons passing through wires. Radio frequency and microwave communications rely on radio waves and microwaves travelling through open space. The major points which distinguish it on positive side are:
→ Low transmission loss and wide Bandwidth:
Optical Fibres have lower transmission losses and wider bandwidth than copper wires. This means that with optical fibre cable systems more data can be sent over longer distances, thereby decreasing the number of wires and reducing the number of repeaters needed for these spans. This reduction in equipment and components decreases the system cost and complexity.
→ Small size and Weight:

The low weight and the small (hair sized) dimensions of fibres offer a distinct advantage over heavy, bulky wire cables in crowded underground city ducts or in ceiling-mounted cable trays. This is also of importance in aircraft, satellites, and ships, where small, lightweight cables are advantageous, and in tactical military applications, where large amounts of cable must be unreeled and retrieved rapidly.
→ Immunity to interference:

An especially important feature of optical fibres relates to their dielectric nature. This provides optical waveguides with immunity to electromagnetic interference (EMI), such as inductive pickup from signal carrying wires and lightning. It also ensures freedom from electromagnetic pulse (EMP) effects, which is of particular interest in military application.
→ Electrical Isolation:
Since optical fibres are constructed of glass, which is an electrical insulator, there is no need to worry about ground loops, Fibre-to-Fibre crosstalks is very low and equipment interface problems are simplified. This also makes the use of fibres attractive in electrically hazardous environment, since the fibre creates no arcing or sparking
→ Signal Security:

By using an optical fibre a high degree of data security is afforded, since the optical signal is well confined within the waveguide (with any emanations being absorbed by an opaque jacketing around the fibre). This makes fibre attractive in applications where information security is important, such as banking, computer networks and military system

→ Abundant raw materials:

Of additional importance is the fact that silica is the principal material of which optical fibres are made. This raw material is abundant and inexpensive, since it is found in ordinary sand. The expense in making the actual fibre arises in the process required to make ultrapure glass from this raw material

→ Fibres are not prone to Thefts:
Last but not the least, that Optical Fibres cables has a distinctive advantage of not being prone to Thefts, as it is the most common practice in conventional copper cables.

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OPTICAL FIBRE COMMUNICATIONS

Optical Fibre: A flexible optically transparent fiber, as of glass or plastic, through which light can be transmitted by successive internal reflections.
Optical fibres are fine threads of glass which are capable of transmitting light at about 2/3 the speed of light in vacuum.
Optical Fibre provides the greatest "Information - Carrying - Potential" of any available medium today.
Optical fibres are a key element in light wave communication.
A fibre is thinner than a human hair but is very strong and takes less room than an ordinary cable.

The main job of an optical fibre is to guide the light (which carries the information) with minimum attenuation or loss of the signal. It offers the most efficient medium for transmitting digitally formatted information from one point to another. An Optical Fibre guides a coded series of light pulses down a path in which none of the information - carrying light signal is lost. Optical fibre cables have a much greater bandwidth than metal cables (that is they transmit more data) and they are less susceptible to interference. Fibre optics technology is relatively new and because of its high efficiency, optical fibre cables are steadily replacing the traditional lines. Currently all new undersea cables are made of optical fibres With the arrival of cable TV systems, optical fibre is getting closer to your home.

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INTELLIGENT DATA MINING TECHNIQUES

Traditional data mining techniques such as association analysis, classification and prediction, cluster analysis, and outlier analysis identify patterns in structured data.3 Newer techniques identify patterns from both structured and unstructured data. As with other forms of data mining, crime data mining raises privacy concerns.4 Nevertheless,
researchers have developed various automated data mining techniques for both local law enforcement and national security applications. Entity extraction identifies particular patterns from data such as text, images, or audio materials. It has been used to automatically identify persons, addresses, vehicles, and personal characteristics from police narrative reports.5 In computer forensics, the extraction of software metrics6—which includes the data structure, program flow, organization and quantity of comments, and use of variable names—can facilitate further investigation by, for example, grouping similar programs written by hackers and tracing their behavior. Entity extraction
provides basic information for crime analysis, but its performance depends greatly on the availability of extensive amounts of clean input data. Clustering techniques group data items into classes with similar characteristics to maximize or minimize intraclass similarity—for example, to identify suspects who conduct crimes in similar ways or
distinguish among groups belonging to different gangs. These techniques do not have a set of prede-fined classes for assigning items. Some researchers use the statistics-based concept space algorithm to automatically associate different objects such as persons, organizations, and vehicles in crime records. Using link analysis techniques to identify similar transactions, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network AI System8 exploits Bank Secrecy Act data to support the detection and analysis of money laundering and other financial crimes. Clustering crime incidents can automate a major part of crime analysis but is limited by the high computational intensity typically required. Association rule mining discovers frequently occurring item sets in a database and presents the patterns as rules. This technique has been applied in network intrusion detection to derive association rules from users’ interaction history. Investigators also can apply this technique to network intruders’ profiles to help detect potential future network attacks. Similar to association rule mining, sequential pattern mining finds frequently occurring sequences of items over a set of transactions that occurred at different times. In network intrusion detection, this approach can identify intrusion patterns among time-stamped data. Showing hidden patterns bene fits crime analysis, but to obtain meaningful results requires rich and highly structured data.

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Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access

New and increasingly advanced data services are driving up wireless traffic, which is being further boosted by growth in voice applications in advanced market segments as the migration from fixed to mobile voice continues. This is already putting pressure on some networks and may be leading to difficulties in maintaining acceptable levels of service to subscribers.
For the past few decades the lower band width applications are growing but the growth of broad band data applications is slow. Hence we require technology which helps in the growth of the broad band data applications. WiMAX is such a technology which helps in point-to-multipoint broadband wireless access with out the need of direct line of sight connectivity with base station.

WiMAX is an acronym that stands for “Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access”.WiMAX does not conflict with WiFi but actually complements it. WiMAX is a wireless metropolitan area network (MAN) technology that will connect IEEE 802.11 (WiFi) hotspots to the Internet and provide a wireless extension to cable and DSL for last mile broadband access. IEEE 802.16 provides up to 50 km of linear service area range and allows user’s connectivity without a direct line of sight to a base station. The technology also provides shared data rates up to 70 Mbit/s.

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