An Introduction to Free-space Optical Communications

Over the last two decades free-space optical communication (FSO) has become more and more interesting as an adjunct or alternative to radio frequency communication. This article gives an overview of the challenges a system designer has to consider while implementing an FSO system. Typical gains and losses along the path from the transmitter through the medium to the receiver are introduced in this article. Detailed discussions of these topics can be found in this special issue of the Radioengineering Journal

Extending EMV Payment Smart Cards with Biometric On-Card Verification

Part 6: Session 4 - Identity Management with Smart CardsInternational audienceNowadays, many bank cards are smart cards (i.e. integrated-circuit cards) based on the EMV specifications for payment systems. This paper specifies how biometric on-card verification can be integrated into EMV debit and credit cards in a backwards-compatible way. The biometric verification does not change the EMV transaction flow outside the cardholder-verification step. The proposed payment system has been prototyped using Java cards and an applet for handwritten signature on-card verification

Effects of time normalization on the accuracy of dynamic time warping

This paper revisits Dynamic Time Warping, a method for assessing the dissimilarity of time series. In particular, this paper provides theoretical and experimental evidence showing that uncritical normalizing the length of the time series to be compared has a detrimental effect on the recognition accuracy in application domains such as on-line signature recognition, where the length of compared time series matters for their classification as match or non-match