- Hi there, Doug Greenwald again,
with the Convergint Technologies
Advanced Solutions Team,
and as companies continue to develop
their return to work strategy,
one area of discussion that has
received a lot of attention,
similar to my previous video with FLIR,
regarding thermal cameras,
is migrating the enterprise
to touchless access control.
In an effort to continue to educate,
and bring companies up
to speed on the basics
of what they will need
to achieve their outcome,
I've asked Brett Mason, with
CrucialTrak to join me today
and help take you on a brief journey
of the evolution of biometrics,
and what it will take
for your enterprise to be successful,
going with a touchless entry strategy.
Now, before we address the topic at hand,
I did want to share
with you to keep a watch
on the Convergint Newsroom
and LinkedIn pages,
for additional videos, upcoming,
including a FLIR update on
their new EST product line,
and a review of the video analytics,
being brought to market to
perform people counting,
mask, and social distancing compliance.
Brett, thank you for joining me today.
If you could, just share a
brief background about yourself,
as well as CrucialTrak.
- Sure thing. Thanks for having me, Doug.
I serve as the Director of Channel Sales
for the Americas Region at CrucialTrak,
and I've been with the
organization for about a year now,
been in the IT channel
for the past 20 years,
working for different manufacturers
in the wireless world,
the power world, and also
telephony and command control.
Obviously, those technologies
cover the security industry
as a whole as well.
So I'm quite versed, and
I live in the Omaha Metro,
with my wife and three boys.
- Awesome, well thank you
again for making time today.
Now, speaking ahead of our time together,
you and I have both been very busy,
discussing touchless
access control inquiries
from organizations looking
to remove points of contact,
like existing touch, biometric
readers, and key pads,
that have been a long time standard.
Can you take a moment
to educate our audience
and walk us through the
evolution of biometrics,
and how that has influenced
the technologies available today?
- Yeah, sure thing, Doug.
You know, it's interesting
when you look at biometrics
in general, they actually date
back to the 1800s in France.
That said, most of the moving and shakings
occurred in the last 20 years.
The more advanced computing
technologies evolve,
then the ability to utilize
biometrics has evolved with it,
and I think one of the biggest
influencers to biometric use
is the need for increased
security and accuracy,
when it comes to the
physical security world.
You can argue that the convenience
is also a big influencer as well.
After all, with the use of biometrics,
like fingerprint and facial recognition,
and your smartphones and tablets today,
and even your laptops, biometric usage
has become more and more
prevalent in society today.
And in regard to touch
base biometric devices,
the industry has largely been utilizing
fingerprint readers of some sort.
The effectiveness of these
devices is largely marginal
due to the many variables.
First and foremost, there's
the fact that these devices
don't have the best reliability issues,
simply with reading the fingerprints,
and that's largely due to
the oils in our skin, lotion,
sanitizers, things like that.
And then also the lens that
the fingerprint camera utilizes
will get smudged, or
murky, or even scratched
because of what I just said,
with our skin variables.
And then I would also
add, that it's very easy
to duplicate a fingerprint image,
and therefore it can be what
we like to refer to as spoofed,
and obviously that's led folks
to investigate other biometric modalities,
such as facial recognition, or iris,
and these technologies are more expensive,
and take a lot of time to
deploy and utilize overall.
One of the major challenges
with facial recognition
again is accuracy, or
spoofing of the system.
In the industry, we use
a term called FAR, F-A-R.
It stands for False Acceptance Rate,
and then we also use the term F-R-R,
or False Rejection Rate,
and clearly you want
to deploy a technology
that has a very low FAR,
and a very low FFR as well,
because that means it's the most accurate,
and it really becomes a big balancing act.
So, with that in mind, a lot of folks
started to turn towards the eyes,
and the reliability of iris
has really long been
thought to be unmatched,
but the time effectiveness
for utilizing iris,
brings a lot of challenges as well.
If you take into account
things like the height
that the installation, or
the relatively short distance
between camera and sensor
for the subject's eyes.
So, now you have folks asking,
okay, what's really good,
really accurate, at a
reasonable investment?
And I think that's what's
really kinda led us today,
to the palm vein modality,
because it has the lowest FAR
and FRR available, and it's
almost impossible to spoof.
You know, from my standpoint,
and point of view,
the cool thing about CrucialTrak is,
in our solutions, we
offer all four modalities
in our solutions, and on top
of that, we're 100% touchless.
So obviously, that has led
to numerous inquiries here,
with the whole COVID-19 outbreak.
- Yeah, absolutely.
We'll come back to the
palm vein thing here
in a little bit, but I definitely think
that with this improvement in accuracy,
and being able to really
take the cardholder,
and associate them with that
personally identifiable mark,
to improve the speed at
which they're detected,
think I'd like the audience to understand
how touchless solutions really work.
What's the architecture behind it,
and, you know, how does it achieve really
better than those previous
generations of touch,
and you mentioned some of the variables
in human skin and everything like that?
So at a greater distance,
how does that reliability and
faster time to entry occur?
- Well, you know, one of
the biggest adjustments
the industry has had to take,
is utilizing better
cameras in their sensors.
And we've also had to increase
the overall measurements, if you will.
For example, on facial recognition,
we now use an average of 80
nodal points on the human face.
And the nodal points are
things like the distance
between a person's eye and nose,
or how deep is their cheekbone.
Most manufacturers are now
utilizing infrared cameras
to differentiate between a
static photo and a live subject.
And when we use palm vein,
we're using a technology
that actually maps out the
different veins and vessels.
So, when you start thinking
about putting that all together,
you know, it brings all new challenges,
but the technology that's available
has allowed us to continue to
advance biometric readings.
So, you know, for speed and efficiency,
different folks have increased
the processing power of the readers,
and the network connectivity
to the controllers and servers.
For us a CrucialTrak, one
of the biggest advantages
to our solution, is the
fact that our database
is highly secured, encrypted,
and it's loaded at the core and the edge.
So, there's no need to
speak to the controller
before allowing access,
and many of our readers have
tamper protection as well.
So that means if someone were
to say, rip a unit off a wall,
the unit would immediately
dump the database
that's on board, and so
it's highly implausible
someone could compromise
our database anyway,
but if they did forcefully remove it,
there wouldn't be data on it at all.
- Perfect, so if I'm a
customer, and I'm coming to you,
and I've got this idea that
I want to move to touchless.
You know, obviously I'm concerned about
being able to leverage that
existing infrastructure.
What kind of cabling needs
to be in place for this?
What's the enrollment process?
And ultimately, what's
the employee experience
going to be like, so that
I can start to plan around
not just the expense of the migration,
but also the time considerations
to gain value from the
system that I just deployed.
Is there a way you could
just walk us through
the high level of what to expect
when implementing the system?
So, if I'm watching this,
and I want to take my
company down this route,
I have a better idea of not just the cost,
but really the time that
needs to be budgeted for this.
- The beauty of the back
solutions that we offer,
is that they all operate on
industry standard technology.
For example, the units support OSDP.
We have a standard Wiegand connection
to interface with legacy access control.
The database is sequel based,
which makes the transfer of records
and formatting, very simple,
and then we do have some
certified integrations as well,
with legacy access control manufacturers.
So when you look at the
fact that the database,
we want to keep it on our system,
because of the encryption and control.
We don't want to move that
database into a legacy system,
and so rather than have our information,
the biometric data go
over to a legacy system,
we pull the legacy data into the CruAMS,
which is the management
system for the BACs units,
and so it can be as
simple as a copy or paste,
or it can be automated in
some situations, as well.
So the enrollment process
really becomes very fast.
Usually, you can enroll
a new user, frankly,
within a minute, and then as
far as actual use of the units,
once they're deployed,
we can validate an employee's biometrics
with under a second.
- Excellent, and so as far as
the database to enroll people,
what can they expect
when they bring employees
in to start this process?
- Yeah. So from a database standpoint,
what typically happens is, you know,
because of the encryption, and the storage
of the different biometric data,
we don't want to push our data
onto a legacy systems database.
Instead, we would pull the
legacy access control system
over to what we call CruAMS,
which is our biometric
database and management system.
And so, you know, it can
be a simple copy and paste
from a spreadsheet,
and then we also have some
certified implementations
with other access control vendors,
where that process is automatic.
And then enrolling somebody's
biometric is quite simple.
You can utilize any one of our readers,
or we actually have an enroll
station, which is, you know,
a desktop system that's set
up ergonomically comfortable,
if you will, with some templates in place
to make sure that we
can scan the biometrics
in a very quick and accurate fashion.
- Perfect, you know, the one thing
that you mentioned earlier,
and I want to kind of circle back on that,
is the idea of using the palm vein
as a form of identification.
You mentioned that it's more accurate,
and has less of a chance of being spoofed
than that, of even the iris.
So, I'd love for you to just
elaborate on why the palm vein,
who came up with that idea,
and how does accuracy
between those two different
forms of verification differ?
- Sure, so, you know, again,
we're gonna use the terms FAR and FRR.
Again, that false acceptance rate,
and the false rejection rate.
You know, palm vein is considered to be
the most accurate, because number one,
it has far more reference points
that are scanned and used,
and simply cannot be copied.
There's there's no way.
You know, a lot of people,
when we say palm vein,
they immediately look at their palm lines.
We're talking about the vein system,
the venous system within the palm,
and so it's very complex, and taking a map
and image of that, it's very
unique to the individual.
And I would also add
that it's really fast,
and it's very convenient for the user.
There's no issues with
distance between like a iris,
you know, having your
face being six inches
from a camera or touching
a fingerprint reader.
The palm vein is very simple.
It's holding your palm up to
the scanner, reading the vein,
and there you go.
But when you look at the FAR
and the FRR comparison to,
and I would compare it to
iris, because you know,
the industry for a very long time,
has felt that the iris was
the most accurate biometric
to measure off of, which it was,
but palm vein really blankets
that, and stomps that out.
So, you know, when you look at the ability
to process under a second,
the FAR rate of a palm vein reader
is a .0000001, which means
there is one out of 10 million chances
that an unregistered
user is authenticated.
And then it has an FRR,
a false rejection rate of
.01, or one out of a hundred,
chance that the register
wouldn't be authenticated.
And therein lies the beauty of
multimodal biometrics, right.
So, when you look at iris,
and in comparison to that,
the FAR is one in 10 million,
and the FRR is one in 10.
So you can see that the palm
vein has 10 times more accuracy
and a far less compromise capability.
- Very interesting.
Bret, this was really helpful information,
and hopefully for you, the viewer,
this brought you closer to
understanding what to expect
if you'd like to start to go down the path
of bringing touchless access
control into your organization.
Click the link below, if
you'd like to get in touch
with myself, or someone on our team
that can specifically walk
through your system architecture,
and dial in the requirements.
Until next time, stay safe, wear a mask,
and thank you for doing your part
to help bring your company and your people
back to work safely, and responsibly.
