Secure portal.

There is a need in security systems to rapidly and accurately grant access of authorized personnel to a secure facility while denying access to unauthorized personnel. In many cases this role is filled by security personnel, which can be very costly. Systems that can perform this role autonomously without sacrificing accuracy or speed of throughput are very appealing. To address the issue of autonomous facility access through the use of technology, the idea of a ''secure portal'' is introduced. A secure portal is a defined zone where state-of-the-art technology can be implemented to grant secure area access or to allow special privileges for an individual. Biometric technologies are of interest because they are generally more difficult to defeat than technologies such as badge swipe and keypad entry. The biometric technologies selected for this concept were facial and gait recognition. They were chosen since they require less user cooperation than other biometrics such as fingerprint, iris, and hand geometry and because they have the most potential for flexibility in deployment. The secure portal concept could be implemented within the boundaries of an entry area to a facility. As a person is approaching a badge and/or PIN portal, face and gait information can be gathered and processed. The biometric information could be fused for verification against the information that is gathered from the badge. This paper discusses a facial recognition technology that was developed for the purposes of providing high verification probabilities with low false alarm rates, which would be required of an autonomous entry control system. In particular, a 3-D facial recognition approach using Fisher Linear Discriminant Analysis is described. Gait recognition technology, based on Hidden Markov Models has been explored, but those results are not included in this paper. Fusion approaches for combining the results of the biometrics would be the next step in realizing the secure portal concept