Are biometric web services a reality? A best practice analysis for telebiometric deployment in open networks

With the growth of biometric system complexity and the resources required for these systems, newer biometric systems are increasingly becoming more distributed to deal with accessibility and computation demand. These telebiometric systems introduce additional problems, which are outside of the scope of traditional biometric standards. Best practices have been published that address problems in these distributed systems, by outlining service-based approaches that provision typical biometric operations through the use of telecommunication standards, such as SOAP. In this paper, 2 families of best practices for telebiometric-based systems (the ITU-T X.1080 family of recommendations and the BIAS family of standards) are reviewed and assessed according to their current deployment potential within an online context. Recommendations are then presented and a verdict is given that shows current best practice provides adequate guidance for the building of large-scale telebiometric systems that utilise web-based biometric services.