Development of an undergraduate course in biometric signal processing

Using an individual's iris pattern, voice, facial characteristics or fingerprints for identification enables a high degree of certainty of a person's identity, especially when used together. This form of identifying people can be used in a variety of applications, including allowing physical access to secure sites, making financial transactions, allowing access to networked computers, or identifying a terrorist in a public place. Due to the potential for research that this relatively new field holds, and its importance to homeland defense, we have built a new Biometric Signal Processing Laboratory, and developed a new course in biometric signal processing. This course was designed for seniors in the electrical engineering major so that they could become familiar with the basis for these new technologies. The course was organized to give the students some background in image processing, from which the identification algorithms are formulated, and had them design simple identification algorithms. The students were exposed to state-of-the-art commercial equipment, including iris scan, fingerprint and facial recognition hardware and software. The course was comprised of three lecture hours and two lab hours each week. We discuss the topics that were covered, the equipment in the lab that supported each topic, the projects that the students performed, field trips, guest lecturers and related senior design projects.