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1858 – First systematic capture of hand images for identification purposes is recorded

Sir William Herschel, working for the Civil Service of India, recorded a handprint on the back of a contract for each worker to distinguish employees from others who might claim to be employees when payday arrived. This was the first recorded systematic capture of hand and finger images that were uniformly taken for identification purposes.

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1892 – Galton develops a classification system for fingerprints

Sir Francis Galton wrote a detailed study of fingerprints in which he presented a new classification system using prints from all ten fingers. The characteristics (minutiae) that Galton used to identify individuals are still used today. These details are often referred to as Galton’s details.

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1896 – Henry develops a fingerprint classification system

Sir Edward Henry, Inspector General of the Bengal Police, was in search of a method of identification to implement concurrently or to replace anthropometries. Henry consulted Sir Francis Galton regarding fingerprinting as a method of identifying criminals. Once the fingerprinting system was implemented, one of Henry’s workers, Azizul Haque, developed a method of classifying and storing the information so that searching could be performed easily and efficiently. Sir Henry later established the first British fingerprint files in London. The Henry Classification System, as it came to be known, was the precursor to the classification system used for many years by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other criminal justice organizations that perform tenprint fingerprint searches.

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1903 – NY State Prisons begin using fingerprints

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1936 – Concept of using the iris pattern for identification is proposed

Ophthalmologist Frank Burch proposed the concept of using iris patterns as a method to recognize an individual.

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1960s – Face recognition becomes semi-automated

The first semi-automatic face recognition system was developed by Woodrow W. Bledsoe under contract to the US Government. This system required the administrator to locate features such as eyes, ears, nose and mouth on the photographs. This system relied solely on the ability to extract useable feature points. It calculated distances and ratios to a common reference point that was compared to the reference data.

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1960 – First model of acoustic speech production is created

A Swedish Professor, Gunnar Fant, published a model describing the physiological components of acoustic speech production. His findings were based on the analysis of x-rays of individuals making specified phonic sounds. These findings were used to better understand the biological components of speech, a concept crucial to speaker recognition.

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1969 – FBI pushes to make fingerprint recognition an automated process

In 1969, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began its push to develop a system to automate its fingerprint identification process, which was quickly becoming overwhelming and required many man-hours. The FBI contracted the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to study the process of automating fingerprint identification. NIST identified two key challenges: (1) scanning fingerprint cards and identifying minutiae and (2) comparing and matching lists of minutiae.

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1970s – Face Recognition takes another step towards automation

Goldstein, Harmon, and Lesk used 21 specific subjective markers such as hair color and lip thickness to automate face recognition. The problem with both of these early solutions was that the measurements and locations were manually computed.

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1974- First commercial hand geometry systems become available

The first commercial hand geometry recognition systems became available in the early 1970s, arguably the first commercially available biometric device after the early deployments of fingerprinting in the late 1960s. These systems were implemented for three main purposes: physical access control; time and attendance; and personal identification.

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1976 – First prototype system for speaker recognition is developed

Texas Instruments developed a prototype speaker recognition system that was tested by the US Air Force and The MITRE Corporation.

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1988 – First semi-automated facial recognition system is deployed

In 1988, the Lakewood Division of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department began using composite drawings (or video images) of a suspect to conduct a database search of digitized mugshots.

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1988 – Eigenface technique is developed for face recognition

Kirby and Sirovich applied principle component analysis, a standard linear algebra technique, to the face recognition problem. This was a milestone because it showed that less than one hundred values were required to approximate a suitably aligned and normalized face image.

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1991 – Face detection is pioneered, making real time face recognition possible

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1992 – Biometric Consortium is established within US Government

The National Security Agency initiated the formation of the Biometric Consortium and held its first meeting in October of 1992.

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1995 – Iris prototype becomes available as a commercial product

The joint project between the Defense Nuclear Agency and lriscan resulted in the availability of the first commercial iris product.

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1996 – Hand geometry is implemented at the Olympic Games

A major public use of hand geometry occurred at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games where hand geometry systems were implemented to control and protect physical access to the Olympic Village. This was a significant accomplishment because the systems handled the enrollment of over 65,000 people. Over 1 million transactions were processed in a period of 28 days.

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1998- FBI launches COOlS (DNA forensic database)

The FBI launched Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) to digitally store, search, and retrieve DNA markers for forensic law enforcement purposes. Sequencing is a laboratory process taking between 40 minutes and several hours.

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2001 – Face recognition is used at the Super Bowl in Tampa, Florida

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2003 – ICAO adopts blueprint to integrate biometrics into machine readable travel documents

On May, 28 2003, The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) adopted a global, harmonized blueprint for the integration of biometric identification information into passports and other Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTDs) … Facial recognition was selected as the globally interoperable biometric for machineassisted
identity confirmation with MRTDs.

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2010 – U.S. national security apparatus utilizes biometrics for terrorist identification

A fingerprint from evidence collected at the believed 9/11 planning location was positively matched to a GITMO detainee. Other fingerprints were identified from items seized at other locations associated with 9/11.

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2011 – Biometric identification used to identify body of Osama bin Laden

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2013 – Apple includes fingerprint scanners into consumer-targed smartphones

1858 - First Implementation
Sir William Herschel
1903 - NY state prison implements fingerpinting
1973 - First commercial hand geometry system
1996 - Hand Geometry implemented in Olympic Games
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2001 - Face recognition used at the SuperBowl
2003 - ICAO adopts blueprint for machine readable documents
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2013 - Apple and Samsung implement fingerprint locks on smartphones
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