Exploring Mobile Biometric Performance through Identification of Core Factors and Relationships

Biometrics, as a form of authentication, has existed for several decades and shows no signs of slowing down. Extensive research has been carried out into enhancing systems either by improving error rates or ease of adoption by examining barriers to use. In this paper, we investigate factors of a biometric system that is likely to affect performance, in particular, focusing on mobile device implementation. By surveying the area, we have identified seven core factors that help to form a clearer understanding of what changes the performance of a system. These seven factors are Users, Modality, Environments, Diversity of Scenarios, System Constraints, Hardware and Algorithms and form ‘The Core Factors Affecting Mobile Biometric Performance’. We utilise these factors to illustrate the practicalities of mobile implementations and indicate future considerations to explore future performance enhancements and provide an informative overview to developers, implementers and testers of biometrics systems, enabling the binning of performance alterations within one of these factors.