Introduction

Abstract

In biometric identification systems, the identity corresponding to an individual is determined by comparing his/her template against all user templates in the database. This exhaustive matching process increases the response time and the number of false matches of the system. An effective mechanism is required that reduces the number of templates to be compared with the query during identification. Biometric indexing is such technique that limits the search space and identifies an individual in real time with high accuracy. Many authors have presented a number of biometric indexing techniques. This chapter explores the fundamentals of biometric indexing, its challenges, classifying and benchmarking along with a number of techniques proposed by various researchers.