Butt biometricsNew biometric technology: butt biometrics

To the long list of body features used to identify a person’s identity – fingerprints, palm design, vein architecture, retina signature, facial recognition, voice, heart pulse, and more – we may now add another part of the human anatomy: one’s butt.

Japanese engineers have designed what they describe as “butt fingerprint.” The first application of the new biometric technology would be to embed it in cars’ driver seats, thus preventing carjacking or car theft. If the car does  not recognize the driver’s butt as that of the car’s owner, the engine would stall.

The Verge reports that Associate Professor Shigeomi Koshimizu at the Advanced Institute of Industrial Technology in Tokyo uses a seat pressure map to generate a web of thirty-nine indices which are used to identify a subject’s rear end. The Japanese researchers report that the results so far have been encouraging, with average Type 1 error (failing correctly to identify the driver’s behind) of 2.2 percent, and Type 2 error (mistakenly letting someone else drive away) of only 1.1 percent.

The researchers say that one of the advantages of butt biometrics over other technologies such as facial recognition or fingerprinting is that other biometric technologies are often dependent for their effectiveness on environmental factors such as lighting and the cleanliness of the sensors, while butt biometrics does not require any special environmental conditions.

Koshimizu believes that the technology could also be used in offices, automatically to log employees in on their computers, for instance, or for generating a “foot map” as a key for accessing secure rooms or buildings.