There is an urgent need for improving security in banking region. With the advent of ATM though banking became a lot easier it even became a lot vulnerable. The chances of misuse of this much hyped ‘insecure’ baby product (ATM) are manifold due to the exponential growth of ‘intelligent’ criminals day by day. ATM systems today use no more than an access card and PIN for identity verification. This situation is unfortunate since tremendous progress has been made in biometric identification techniques, including finger printing, retina scanning, and facial recognition. This paper proposes the development of a system that integrates facial recognition technology into the identity verification process used in ATMs. The development of such a system would serve to protect consumers and financial institutions alike from fraud and other breaches of security.

Introduction

The rise of technology in India has brought into force many types of equipment that aim at more customer satisfaction. ATM is one such machine which made money transactions easy for customers to bank. The other side of this improvement is the enhancement of the culprit’s probability to get his ‘unauthentic’ share. Traditionally, security is handled by requiring the combination of a physical access card and a PIN or other password in order to access a customer’s account. This model invites fraudulent attempts through stolen cards, badly-chosen or automatically assigned PINs, cards with little or no encryption schemes, employees with access to non-encrypted customer account information and other points of failure.

Our paper proposes an automatic teller machine security model that would combine a physical access card, a PIN, and electronic facial recognition. By forcing the ATM to match a live image of a customer’s face with an image stored in a bank database that is associated with the account number, the damage to be caused by stolen cards and PINs is effectively neutralized. Only when the PIN matches the account and the live image and stored image match would a user be considered fully verified.

The main issues faced in developing such a model are keeping the time elapsed in the verification process to a negligible amount, allowing for an appropriate level of variation in a customer’s face when compared to the database image, and that credit cards which can be used at ATMs to withdraw funds are generally issued by institutions that do not have in-person contact with the customer, and hence no opportunity to acquire a photo.

Because the system would only attempt to match two (and later, a few) discrete images, searching through a large database of possible matching candidates would be unnecessary. The process would effectively become an exercise in pattern matching, which would not require a great deal of time. With appropriate lighting and robust learning software, slight variations could be accounted for in most cases. Further, a positive visual match would cause the live image to be stored in the database so that future transactions would have a broader base from which to compare if the original account image fails to provide a match – thereby decreasing false negatives.

When a match is made with the PIN but not the images, the bank could limit transactions in a manner agreed upon by the customer when the account was opened, and could store the image of the user for later examination by bank officials. In regards to bank employees gaining access to customer PINs for use in fraudulent transactions, this system would likewise reduce that threat to exposure to the low limit imposed by the bank and agreed to by the customer on visually unverifiable transactions.

In the case of credit card use at ATMs, such a verification system would not currently be feasible without creating an overhaul for the entire credit card issuing industry, but it is possible that positive results (read: significant fraud reduction) achieved by this system might motivate such an overhaul.

The last consideration is that consumers may be wary of the privacy concerns raised by maintaining images of customers in a bank database, encrypted or otherwise, due to possible hacking attempts or employee misuse. However, one could argue that having the image compromised by a third party would have far less dire consequences than the account information itself. Furthermore, since nearly all ATMs videotape customers engaging in transactions, it is no broad leap to realize that banks already build an archive of their customer images, even if they are not necessarily grouped with account information.