The new Indian identity

Updated on: Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Meet Samarth Bharadwaj and Himanshu Bhatt, both second-year research students at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi. Both of them are part of a team of students from IIIT-Delhi , who are working and contributing to the unique identification project started by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) in 2006.The basic aim of the project is to provide a 'unique' identification to every individual and to eliminate cases of duplicate and fake identities.

As to his role in the UIDAI project at the IIIT-Delhi , Bharadwaj, a second-year research student said that they had begun working on the project last year. "Four research students from our college conducted a feasibility study on finger prints of labourers and farmers — people who work with their hands — to analyse the quality of their fingerprints and find out if they can be used as a part of unique identification," said Bhatt.
As part of the unique identification drive, fingerprints and retina identification will be stored as unique identifying features of people. It is usually difficult to get clear fingerprints of labourers and people who work with their hands, compared to other people, because they work with their hands for years and as a result they may have scars or warts, which make the fingerprints difficult to capture.

Elaborating on the procedure, Bharadwaj said, "We were given a huge database of fingerprints . Through the database, we extracted features of individual fingerprints and matched them with two things — our own quality standards or algorithms and the UID-prescribed quality standards or algorithms. Most of the data was of good quality, which was unexpected."

As part of the first phase, both Bhatt and Bharadwaj worked on the project for about three months. As researchers, Bhatt's study is usually based on a limited number of samples. This was the first time that Bhatt was part of an initiative that was being implemented on a national scale.

Talking about the first phase that was undertaken at IIIT-Delhi , Mayank Vatsa, associate professor, image analysis and biometrics lab, recalled, "The team analysed the fingerprint database from the rural and urban population, using standard fingerprint image quality assessment tools. We found that the quality of the fingerprints captured for the UIDAI project were comparable to the quality of fingerprints captured in Western countries, when proper operational procedures are followed and quality devices are used."

Based on these results, the IIIT team offered recommendations/best practices for the UIDAI biometrics standards. Currently, with the support of UIDAI, the research team is planning to extend the research project to 'multimodal biometrics' including fingerprint, iris, and face.

In this phase, the team aims to analyse the quality of multimodal biometric images and provide insight into data quality and relation of data quality to ethnicity, age, gender and workgroup as well as 'recognition' performance.

UID is a huge project. Involving college students in the project is likely to give students a sense of belonging and partnership in the project.When technology is used in the right way, it opens up opportunities for development and growth of a country.

Times of India

The new Indian identity

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