How Do Identification and Verification Differ?

In day-to-day life most people with whom you do business verify your identity. You claim to be someone (your claimed identity) and then provide proof to back up your claim. For encounters with friends and family, there is no need to claim an identity. Instead, those familiar to you identify you, determining your identity upon seeing your face or hearing your voice. 

These two examples illustrate the difference between the two primary uses of biometrics:  identification and verification.

Identification (1:N, one-to-many, recognition) - The process of determining a person's identity by performing matches against multiple biometric templates. Identification systems are designed to determine identity based solely on biometric information. There are two types of identification systems: positive identification and negative identification. 

Positive identification systems are designed to find a match for a user's biometric information in a database of biometric information. Positive identification answers the "Who am I?," although the response is not necessarily a name - it could be an employee ID or another unique identifier. A typical positive identification system would be a prison release program where users do not enter an ID number or use a card, but simply look at a iris capture device and are identified from an inmate database.

Negative identification systems search databases in the same fashion, comparing one template against many, but are designed to ensure that a person is not present in a database. This prevents people from enrolling twice in a system, and is often used in large-scale public benefits programs in which users enroll multiple times to gain benefits under different names.

 

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