About Biometrics
What are Biometrics?
Biometrics is data that measures personal information about an individual’s physical or behavioural characteristics in order to verify their unique identity. It covers a wide range of personal characteristics including fingerprint identification, iris and retina scanning, face recognition, vein geometry and voice recognition.
The use of biometrics is becoming increasingly common in both public and private sectors. It is also now commonly used as a personal device security mechanism (eg: mobile phone or PC).
REACH BioPad and the REACH Boarding School System is restricted to using fingerprint biometrics information only. Any photographs taken by the REACH BioPad may be stored for event record purposes only and they are not used, stored or recorded for biometric facial recognition purposes.
Why use Biometrics?
Biometrics are suited to all applications where the accurate identification of an individual is essential. Its utilisation in school administration has grown globally in the past decade because it provides an ideal solution for school administrators in their effort to identify students, provide accurate and auditable student records and provide a safer and more secure environment for students, teachers and staff.
Biometrics provides a level of certainty that is not possible with other methods of identification verification. Student Identity Cards are regularly forgotten, lost, mutilated and shared; PINs and Passwords are easily forgotten, swapped or stolen. These current methods of identity verification do not offer a level of assurance that is indisputable.
By using biometrics for identification, the problems and costs associated with the current methods can be avoided and new standards of accountability can be put into place.
How we record Biometric information
REACH BioPad captures images and measurements of fingerprints to extract unique biometric data. It uses a complex set of algorithms to identify and apply unique minutiae measurements into an encrypted binary number template.
An important distinction in the procedure for fingerprint data management using REACH is that an image of the fingerprint is never stored by the REACH BioPad or the REACH Boarding School System itself.
An encrypted binary template (i.e. measurements taking from the fingerprints captured) is created and used to establish the characteristic for each unique identity and this is verified when replica binary prints are identified. Importantly, this encrypted binary template is only usable in the REACH system.
How REACH BioPad differs from law enforcement fingerprinting
There are several significant differences between finger printing law enforcement applications and finger scanning identification methods that are used by the REACH BioPad.
Finger printing in the law enforcement context captures and stores rolled images of fingers. Rolled images capture unique identifying points on the entire finger surface in order to collect the maximum number of unique identifying points. Finger scanning uses flat images of a fingerprint to create binary templates. Flat images reveal the centre of the finger and require only a minimum of unique identifying points in order to generate a digital interpretation and no fingerprint images are ever stored. The purpose of the REACH BioPad scanning process is to identify and recognise a person that is already enrolled in the software.
No Fingerprints are Saved
An important distinction in the procedure for fingerprint data management using REACH is that an image of the fingerprint is never stored by the REACH BioPad or the REACH Boarding School System itself.