A team of engineers at the University of Ilorin (UNILORIN) has produced a prototype biometric machine that can uniquely recognise biometric features of Nigerians, a major deficiency of imported machines.

The team leader, Prof. Tunji Samuel Ibiyemi of the Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department, as reported by the internal organ of the institution, said that they used local resources to discover why imported biometric machines cannot adequately recognise physical features of black people.

Ibiyemi and the three other researchers, Prof. J. Sadiku (Computer Science), Dr. S. A. Aliu and Dr. I. O. Avazi (Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department) studied ‘Biometric Signal Processing for Personal Application and Forensic Application’.

Using funds provided by the World Bank through the Science and Technology Education Post-Basic (STEP-B) project, the researchers were able to produce a machine that can detect impersonation, economic fraud, multiple voting, examination malpractices, rigging and solve all kinds of security and corruption problems for Nigeria.

Ibiyemi said foreign biometric machines do not work optimally on black people as they do on whites so cannot produce the desired results.

He said: “The lack of local content in the making of the machines we use for vital national assignments perhaps explain why government efforts on projects like e-voting, national identity card scheme, security intelligence on criminal citizens had not been yielding enough fruits.

“An average Chinese recognises Chinese people more easily. Likewise, Americans know one another better. When I was in Britain, any black person could pick any of his friend’s identity card and go anywhere across the country unfettered. Those working at the airports will confirm to you that you need local people to identify one another.

“Most imported machines don’t recognise tribal marks. These machines raise alarm when they see a masked face. But what we have produced can recognise tribal marks, faces that are masked and faces that are disguised using cosmetics.”

He said the machine can recognize so many human-related features.

“We used machines to recognise the human face, human iris, finger prints, toe prints and sole prints. We worked on speaker and speech recognition, signature verification and hand writing verification. What we found is amazing. For example, using any of these parameters, we can get different patterns of iris, fingerprints, toeprints, soleprints that differentiate the 14 billion people in the world,” he said.

Compared to foreign machines, Ibiyemi said the one developed by his team is cheaper and more functional. While an Iris Scanner from overseas cost N400,000 ($2,500), he said a locally-made one cost only N60, 000 to produce.

In the course of the research, Ibiyemi said the team created a website for biometric data on black people - the first of its kind worldwide - and has collected millions of data on it.

“No website is available within Africa for biometric data on black people. Foreign data are populated by white people. We needed black people’s data to work with, so we started our own website. We collected over one million fingerprints, 600,000 toeprints, 200 soleprints, and 374 latent fingerprints. The website is hosted in Italy. We also went to the home of lepers and took 200 soleprints. When we brought them to the laboratory, we discovered that it is easier to recognise people through their soleprints than through their fingerprints,” he said.

Prof. Ibiyemi, who thanked the Federal Government for making the grant of $250,000 (about N31million) available for the study, he challenged other researchers in the country to access available research funds. He lamented that out of the available $18millon STEP-B funds, only about 10 per cent has so far been accessed by 18 successful researchers nationwide.