Tipping point unclear for mass market adoption of biometrics

Though the industry has not settled on a single biometric identifier, Cukic said that there are definitely three leading modalities, which include fingerprint, facial and iris recognition. In fact, Cukic envisions a future where a system will automatically select the best identifier to use.  

"I don’t think the market will settle for a single biometric. The acquisition qualities reduce the effectiveness of potentially every modality that we know of today, requiring highly-cooperative users at time when users are not trained anymore to spend too much time cooperating with a device." Cukic explained. "Therefore, I see the major technology trend towards unconstrained acquisition in which systems acquire biometrics over a period of time and select the best quality image or video sequence, rather than wait for the user to essentially provide that one, very high-quality sample."

Eventually, Cukic believes that biometrics will become a regular integrated component of security systems and not an add-on feature.  "Biometrics will be a regular part of security solutions, not an appendage to existing, prevalent systems," he said.