Smart cards and biometry - Fingerprint recognition as an example for coding biometric reference data

Smart Cards are becoming more and more powerful devices and provide a lot of services together with their related service systems. To avoid the unauthorised use of a smart card after theft or loss, it has to check whether it is used by the authorised user or not. Due to the technical progress reached so far, biometric authentication methods are getting more and more important as opposed to the previoulsy used PIN-method, a knowledge based user authentication method. To enable smart cards of different chip card providers working together with service systems of different biometric systems' providers, it is necessary to standardize the contents and coding conventions of biometric templates and feature matching algorithms, too. The article deals with actually known examples for coding biometric reference data with the example of the method of fingerprint recognition.