Advanced identification technologies for human-computer interaction in crisis rooms

The advances in computer and communication technologies increased both the number of users and the amount of data shared over the Network. Many times the amount of complex and articulated information available makes it difficult to retrieve what is really required for a given task. For these reasons, the efficient, easy and trustworthy transfer of data is now of paramount importance in many everyday scenarios, especially concerning environments and situations where security and data protection are mandatory. On the other hand, data protection often implies the adoption of security means which create virtual (and sometimes even physical) barriers to data retrieval. In this paper, advanced identification technologies, based on the processing of biometric data, are presented. These techniques provide a number of tools to facilitate the seamless human interaction with the data, and the security barriers, by enabling the environment to recognize and learn from the user, shaping the data available on the basis of his/her identity. The presented techniques are based on the extraction of invariant features from face and fingerprint images to process static biometric features, also allowing the enhancement of identification accuracy by data fusion