(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
There are many different types of perfection.
This post concentrates on IDENTIFICATION perfection, or the ability to enjoy zero errors when identifying individuals.
The risk of claiming identification perfection (or any perfection) is that a SINGLE counter-example disproves the claim.
- If you assert that your biometric solution offers 100% accuracy, a SINGLE false positive or false negative shatters the assertion.
- If you claim that your presentation attack detection solution exposes deepfakes (face, voice, or other), then a SINGLE deepfake that gets past your solution disproves your claim.
- And as for the pre-2009 claim that latent fingerprint examiners never make a mistake in an identification…well, ask Brandon Mayfield about that one.
In fact, I go so far as to avoid using the phrase “no two fingerprints are alike.” Many years ago (before 2009) in an International Association for Identification meeting, I heard someone justify the claim by saying, “We haven’t found a counter-example yet.” That doesn’t mean that we’ll NEVER find one.
You’ve probably heard me tell the story before about how I misspelled the word “quality.”
In a process improvement document.
While employed by Motorola (pre-split).
At first glance, it appears that Motorola would be the last place to make a boneheaded mistake like that. After all, Motorola is known for its focus on quality.
But in actuality, Motorola was the perfect place to make such a mistake, since it was one of the champions of the “Six Sigma” philosophy (which targets a maximum of 3.4 defects per million opportunities). Motorola realized that manufacturing perfection is impossible, so manufacturers (and the people in Motorola’s weird Biometric Business Unit) should instead concentrate on reducing the error rate as much as possible.
So one misspelling could be tolerated, but I shudder to think what would have happened if I had misspelled “quality” a second time.
Bredemarket 