Most recent issue published online for the International Journal of Information Technology and Management.

Using biometrics and active RFID to improve security and safety in mass casualty management

Qinghan Xiao — 2011-12-01T23:20:50-05:00

Using biometrics and active RFID to improve security and safety in mass casualty management
Qinghan Xiao, Diana Wilkinson, Malcolm Anderson
International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. 11, No. 1/2 (2012) pp. 2 - 17
In a mass casualty incident, it is necessary to control the access to the incident-site to maintain site security and to obtain accurate and real-time incident data. Currently, first responders are identified by their badges and/or uniforms, and may need to on-scene-triage patients using a tag-classification system. Potential security and safety problems may develop because the badges could be duplicated or cloned, uniforms could be found at thrift stores, and the paper tags may have limitations in preserving information during documentation. In this paper, we present a combined approach that uses biometric technology to verify the identity of first responders and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to assist in triage of mass casualty victims. In contrast to other proposals that recommend smart cards to carry biometric data and use passive RFID tags as triage tags; we propose using active RFID wristband to perform both verification and triage functions.

Dealing with biometric multi-dimensionality through chaotic neural network methodology

Marina L. Gavrilova — 2011-12-01T23:20:50-05:00

Dealing with biometric multi-dimensionality through chaotic neural network methodology
Marina L. Gavrilova, Kushan Ahmadian
International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. 11, No. 1/2 (2012) pp. 18 - 34
Acquiring a group of different biometrics characteristic and specifications results in a number of issues that should be addressed in a modern biometric system. One of the common problems is the high dimensionality of the data, which may impact negatively the biometric system performance. The complexity of data is rarely considered in multimodal biometric systems due to the gap between recently developed dimensionality reduction techniques in data mining and data analysis of biometric features. To remedy the situation, this paper proposes a unique methodology for shrinking down the finite search space of all possible subspaces. The approach also utilises the function approximation capabilities of chaotic neural networks to act as an associative memory to learn the biometric patterns. In summary, the contribution of this paper is in novel methodology based on the axis-parallel dimension reduction technique and chaotic neural network to improve the performance and circumvention of biometric system.

A new soft biometric approach for keystroke dynamics based on gender recognition

Romain Giot — 2011-12-01T23:20:50-05:00

A new soft biometric approach for keystroke dynamics based on gender recognition
Romain Giot, Christophe Rosenberger
International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. 11, No. 1/2 (2012) pp. 35 - 49
Keystroke dynamics allows to authenticate individuals through their way of typing on a computer keyboard. In this study, we are interested in static shared secret keystroke dynamics (all the users type the same password). We present new soft biometrics information which can be extracted from keystroke typing patterns: the gender of the user. This is the first study, to our knowledge, experimenting such kind of information in the field of keystroke dynamics. We present a method for gender recognition through keystroke dynamics with more than 91% of accuracy, on the tested dataset, and we show the improvement on keystroke dynamics authentication method using such kind of information through pattern and score fusion. We obtain a gain of 20% when using gender information against a classical keystroke dynamics method.

Multi fuzzy vault based on secret sharing for deadlock restoration

Hongtao Chen — 2011-12-01T23:20:50-05:00

Multi fuzzy vault based on secret sharing for deadlock restoration
Hongtao Chen, Heng Zhao, Liaojun Pang, Jimin Liang, Jie Tian
International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. 11, No. 1/2 (2012) pp. 50 - 60
A new multi-biometric-based secret sharing algorithm is presented to relieve the message deadlock problem of the single biometric instance-based fuzzy vault method. A multi-vault structure is constructed for all participants to equally share the key. During the enrolment procedure, sub-keys are generated from the key by applying secret sharing scheme and each of them is bound with a minutia set by a modified fuzzy vault method. At the authentication stage, the key can be reconstructed when the necessary minutia sets come together. The experimental results on FVC2002 DB2 show that the proposed scheme decreases the deadlock rate without increasing the false acceptance rate significantly.

Biometric access control in the workplace: benefit or bind?

Lynne Norris-Jones — 2011-12-01T23:20:50-05:00

Biometric access control in the workplace: benefit or bind?
Lynne Norris-Jones
International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. 11, No. 1/2 (2012) pp. 61 - 71
Biometrics refers to the measurement of physiological or behavioural characteristics distinctive to an individual. Social acceptance of biometric technology is dependent on society's perception of its value weighed against perceived risks of invasion of privacy. This paper focuses on measures taken by UK-based manufacturers, suppliers and managers of biometric access control systems to implement procedures to address this dichotomy within working environments. The findings provide a practical insight into the methods of applying access control techniques in a variety of workplace environments. They suggest a number of guidelines for achieving maximum social, legal and ethical acceptance from manufacturing, supply and management perspectives.

Some issues of biometrics: technology intelligence, progress and challenges

L. Wang — 2011-12-01T23:20:50-05:00

Some issues of biometrics: technology intelligence, progress and challenges
L. Wang
International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. 11, No. 1/2 (2012) pp. 72 - 82
Biometrics has been used in healthcare systems, banking and finance, energy systems, access control in computer centres, military, and homeland security such as e-passport, border crossing control, airport security, criminal identification, and fighting terrorists. Biometric technologies such as face, fingerprint and iris recognition, multi-biometrics, and their technology intelligence, applications, and advances were studied. 13 attributes of six biometric technologies including face, fingerprint, iris, voice, hand geometry and signature recognition, and false reject rates (FRR) and false accept rates (FAR) of the six biometric technologies were summarised and compared based on technology evaluation or scenario evaluation. Challenges and future research of biometrics were also discussed.

An efficient unsupervised sample clustering for cancer datasets based on statistical model pre-processing

N. Tajunisha — 2011-12-01T23:20:50-05:00

An efficient unsupervised sample clustering for cancer datasets based on statistical model pre-processing
N. Tajunisha, V. Saravanan
International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. 11, No. 1/2 (2012) pp. 83 - 91
DNA microarray technology can be used to measure expression levels for thousands of genes in a single experiment across different samples. Within a gene expression matrix there are usually several particular macroscopic phenotypes of samples related to some diseases or drug effects such as diseased samples, normal samples or drug treated samples. The goal of sample-based clustering is to find the phenotype structure or substructure of the samples. In this paper, we present a new framework for unsupervised sample-based clustering using informative genes for microarray data. In our work, initial clusters are formed using k-means with fixed initial centroid and then we have used statistical method to find informative genes which are used in turn to obtain an improved clustering. The goal of our clustering approach is to perform better cluster discovery on samples with informative genes. By comparing the results of proposed method with the existing methods, it was found that the results obtained are more accurate in cancer datasets.

ATPDI: a computational definition of fingerprint singular points

Li-Min Liu — 2011-12-01T23:20:50-05:00

ATPDI: a computational definition of fingerprint singular points
Li-Min Liu
International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. 11, No. 1/2 (2012) pp. 92 - 111
In this paper, a computational definition of fingerprint singular points based on aligned tri-coloured pixel-wise directional image, called ATPDI, is presented. The traditional descriptive definitions, geometric definition, and ISO/IEC definition are explained in detail with discussion of their advantages and disadvantages. The quality of a singular point definition is measured by three factors: completeness, rotation sensibility, and precision. We used NIST-4 database for experimental tests, and the experimental results show the ATPDI does not leave cases undefined, is rotation insensitive, and can define singular points in a 2

A user dependent multi-resolution approach for biometric data

Loris Nanni — 2011-12-01T23:20:50-05:00

A user dependent multi-resolution approach for biometric data
Loris Nanni, Sheryl Brahnam, Alessandra Lumini
International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. 11, No. 1/2 (2012) pp. 112 - 121
This paper focuses on the use of a user dependent multi-resolution approach based on local ternary pattern (LTP) in biometric verification. Following an extensive review of the literature on texture descriptors, several methods are compared on well known biometric problems: palm verification and knuckle verification. We propose approaches for extracting a set of local ternary pattern bins separately from the training set of each user, then the Chi square distance is used to compare two templates. The paper is more experimental than novelty in algorithm, our aim is to compare our system with the standard multi-resolution approach, with the novel hierarchical local binary patterns (HLBP) and with different fusions. Extensive experiments conducted over the two well-known biometric characteristics (palmprint and knuckleprint) show the strength of our approach. When each user is given the related selected bins, a near 0 equal error rate is obtained. When the impostor steals the 'selected bins' of the user that he claims to be, our approach slightly outperforms both the standard multi-resolution approach and HLBP. A further improvement in the performance is obtained combining LTP and HLBP.

Enhancing the privacy of electronic passports

Rima Belguechi — 2011-12-01T23:20:50-05:00

Enhancing the privacy of electronic passports
Rima Belguechi, Patrick Lacharme, Christophe Rosenberger
International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. 11, No. 1/2 (2012) pp. 122 - 137
We address in this paper the problem of privacy in the current architecture in electronic passports for the storage and transmission of biometric data such as fingerprints. The current architecture provides a good protection of biometric personal data but brute force attack could be used in the near future using cloud computing. We propose a new solution combining cryptographic protocols and cancellable biometrics to solve this problem. The biocode of an individual is protected by cryptographic keys exchanged by the PACE protocol. We put into obviousness the benefit of the proposed solution in terms of security and privacy.

Identities, forgeries and disguises

Gerard Chollet — 2011-12-01T23:20:50-05:00

Identities, forgeries and disguises
Gerard Chollet, Patrick Perrot, Walid Karam, Chafic Mokbel, Sanjay Kanade, Dijana Petrovska-Delacret
International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. 11, No. 1/2 (2012) pp. 138 - 152
The preservation of your identity could become a major concern. In many situations, you need to claim an identity and this claim needs to be verified somehow. The technology called biometrics may help. But, what if a deliberate impostor claims your identity? Will this forgery be always detected? Biometric identity verification is imperfect. This paper reviews some of the techniques that a deliberate impostor could use to defeat a biometric verification system. It focuses on audio-visual forgeries using voice conversion and face animation. It also describes identity disguise as a means of falsifying and concealing one's identity. The recovery of an identity and cancellable biometrics are also useful techniques to protect from identity theft. Such techniques could also find useful applications in multimedia.

The best of adaptive and predictive methodologies: open source software development, a balance between agility and discipline

Chitu Okoli — 2011-12-01T23:20:50-05:00

The best of adaptive and predictive methodologies: open source software development, a balance between agility and discipline
Chitu Okoli, Kevin Carillo
International Journal of Information Technology and Management, Vol. 11, No. 1/2 (2012) pp. 153 - 166
Open source software development (OSSD) is a promising alternative for synthesising agile and plan-driven (e.g., waterfall) software development methodologies that retains most benefits of the two approaches. We contrast the traditional systems development life cycle approach, more recent agile software development methods, and OSSD. We compare the first two approaches with OSSD, highlighting its synthesis of benefits from both, with unique benefits of its own, offering solutions to areas where the other methodologies continue to face difficulties. OSSD is highly responsive to user needs, and potentially draws talent from a global team of developers. OSSD is a relatively low-risk methodology with potentially high return on investment. While not appropriate for all applications, especially those where the needed applications are extremely idiosyncratic to one company, it is nonetheless a valuable asset in an organisation's portfolio of software development solutions.