Test-taking ID system upgraded with biometrics

Fujitsu Frontech North America Inc. and Sensometrix today announced an award of services by Pearson VUE, the testing administration and services provider that delivers millions of tests a year for clients in the licensure, certification, academic admissions, regulatory, and government testing service markets.

Pearson VUE has in recent years deployed Fujitsu’s PalmSecure biometric identification technology to over 500 Pearson VUE test facilities worldwide. Test takers are able to quickly, conveniently and accurately establish their identity by placing a palm over the Fujitsu PalmSecure™ reader before proceeding with any scheduled tests. Under the new multi-year agreement, Pearson VUE introduced one-to-many (1:N) matching to provide an enhanced layer of fraud prevention, utilizing the SensoBrain distributed biometric acceleration technology. The Sensometrix technology rapidly compares each test taker’s biometrics to those of everyone else in a client’s testing program, ensuring that any potential fraudulent testing based on impersonation can be proactively eliminated before it occurs.

PalmSecure is a non-contact biometric solution that works by emitting a near-infrared light aimed at a person’s palm to map the person’s vein pattern and generate a baseline, encrypted, unique biometric “template” linked to the person’s confirmed identity. An enrolled person places his or her palm over the PalmSecure sensor to generate a template of the current palm vein pattern and compare it against the baseline templates stored in the database.

The Sensometrix SensoBrain technology is a distributed solution for accelerating one-to-many (1:N) biometric identification that is layered upon the PalmSecure palm vein solution. The system is fault tolerant and able to process operations among a heterogeneous large server cluster. It handles the distribution of identifications within the cluster to allow for maximum throughput based on available total system resources.