Ted Gooding

Hand Biometrics Using Capacitive Touchscreens

Biometric methods for authentication on mobile devices are becoming popular. Some methods such as face and voice biometrics are problematic in noisy mobile environments, while others such as fingerprint require specialized hardware to operate. We present a novel biometric authentication method that uses raw touch capacitance data captured from the hand touching a display. Performance results using a moderate sample size (N = 40) yielded an equal error rate (EER) of 2.5%, while a 1-month longitudinal study using a smaller sample (N = 10) yielded an EER = 2.3%. Overall, our results provide evidence for biometric uniqueness, permanence and user acceptance.