Please have your e-passport and fingertips ready please!

Biometric passports are increasingly mandatory for citizens in industrialised countries and others. Where did the trend come from? Beyond the politico-legal aspects, deployments of such systems to populations in the millions are bound to come with very challenging problems. In this talk, we'll review the technical background of ICAO e-passports and investigate issues that are likely to appear.

We will cover biometric data quality issues, acquisition ergonomics, age-related issues, interoperability of biometric data/templates/decision thresholds, large-scale population effects and the Zoo, the information content of biometrics, and reversibility and synthetic forgeries. Time permitting we'll also dig into privacy-preserving biometric templates.

This talk builds on the technical principles explained in my first talk, "introduction to biometric recognition".