Is It Really Your Kid???

Whose Baby Is It???

You know, the world’s population is growing by leaps and bounds.  The world’s population is at some 6 Billion people right now, and is far expected to surpass those levels who knows when.  A major thrust of this growth comes from the huge population centers and cities in India and China.  Even despite the policies of various governments around the world to limit the number of children per couple, the population still continues to grow at an ever exploding rate.  It is not the goal of this Posting or even this blog site to discuss how to manage the world’s growth, but what this Posting is about ways in which people can be properly verified and/or identified in the face of this rising growth.  And yep, you got it, Biometrics is once again in the limelight (hard guess, huh???). 

Biometrics has always been the tool used to confirm, without a doubt, the verification of individuals, from the moment they are born.  Granted, it may not be used everywhere, especially here in the United States, but in the developing parts of the world, where verification and identification technologies are still primitive, Biometrics is the one which provides the proverbial “smoking gun”.  And, the use of Biometrics in these parts of the world is very often used to verify and/or identify twins right after birth.  Today, I came across a news article (albeit a brief one) which provides further insights into separating twins, based upon their Biometrics.  Studies were conducted at Michigan State University.  

This research project is known as “Multimodal Traits of Identical Twins”.  And as usual, here are the details of this:  “The requirement for biometric systems to accurately determine the identity of a person who has an identical twin becomes more important with the rise in twin births. Anatomy and the formation process of the biometric characteristic, which state they are different even in identical twins due to a number of random factors during the gestation period supports the discriminability of some of the identical twin biometric traits, such as fingerprints, iris and palmprints . . . Unimodal finger biometric systems were show in these experiments to distinguish two different persons who are not identical twins better than they can distinguish identical twins; this difference is not as significant in the iris biometric system, and is much larger in the face biometric system . . . The best performance is shown in multimodal biometric systems that combine different units of the same biometric modality (e.g. multiple fingerprints or left and right irises), achieving an almost perfect separation between genuine and impostor distributions.”  (SOURCE:  http://www.findbiometrics.com/articles/i/8803/).

Final Thoughts On Today’s Posting

A number of key thoughts come across my mind here:

*Both types of Biometrics Technologies classifications were utilized in this study, which includes both the unimodal (using one Biometric), and the multimodal approach (where two or more Biometrics are used);

*In this study, a representative sample of 66 families with twins were utilized (is this a big enough sample?  It could very well be, but I think perhaps a much greater statistical representation would perhaps provide more insight???);

*When the unimodal approach was used, it could verify and/or identify different individuals much better than trying to confirm the identity of individual twins;

*The performance results increased greatly when mulitmodal Biometrics were used.  But the key thing to remember here is that multimodal is not defined by using different types and kinds of Biometric Technologies, but rather using the same one (like Fingerprint Recognition, Facial Recognition, or even Iris Recognition) from different perspectives (like examining the iris twins using the same technology from the same Biometrics Vendor, but angling the template extraction process from both the left and right sides of the Iris).

Some number of years ago, I wrote an article about Retinal Recognition.  In it, I wrote, that the retina possesses enough rich and unique data that it can even discriminate against identical twins (in other words, even identical twins have different retinal structures).  So, the finding in bullet point #3 comes as a surprise to me as sorts. 

Heck, even I thought Iris Recognition could do the trick as well.  Well, irregardless of what Biometric Technology is used, this study simply underscores the significance of the social aspects of trying to confirm the identification of identical twins. 

It can be a very difficult task to achieve, but Biometrics will just make it that much easier.  And in countries where the population keeps booming on an ever increasing basis, like China and India, ascertaining an accurate count of twins becomes of even greater and more critical importance, so they can be recognized in the eyes of their own government and receive their fair share of entitlements and benefits as they mature and grown in their lifetimes.

Comments

[Catherine]

Indian is the biggest populous nation in the world, the rate of population increase is also growing rapidly~~`