Cards
As smart as a card. All the credit cards and phone cards that you carry in your wallet look very much alike, and can only be used worldwide thanks to their dimensions and thickness based on ISO/IEC 7810, Identification cards – Physical characteristics. Engineers are working to making cards tougher and smarter with newer technologies, and ISO has completed standards for contactless cards (cards that you just run past a scanner, now most commonly used to open security doors). Another International Standard (ISO/IEC 7816-11:2004) covers biometrics, a technique with a big future for security applications, used on passport and credit cards. Biometric mechanisms - which include iris scanning, finger imaging and facial recognition - measure physiological and/or behavioural characteristics to verify the identity of an individual. Airline security and the banking sector are just two of the applications where personal identification based on biometric mechanisms is being applied.
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