Fingerprint biometrics has emerged as the leading way to protect consumer electronics and industrial devices but soon it may be overtaken by the next generation of biometric modalities, including face and iris recognition as well as pulse-based security.
The news comes from ABI Research, which forecasted that as average selling prices from iris biometric modules drop, and once timid face recognition is fine-tuned with sophisticated machine learning algorithms, these will eat away at the fingerprint market.
ABI pointed to Apple’s choice to not use fingerprint identification but face recognition for its iPhone X and Samsung’s choice to focus on iris recognition for the Galaxy S8 and S9. However, the market research firm said that fingerprint sensors will continue to survive in the short-term as vendors introduce more robust, spoof-resistant sensors and invisible, under-display sensors.
ABI forecasts shipments for fingerprint sensors to reach 1.2 billion worldwide by 2018, dominating the market for biometrics, but in the long-term will be threatened by multi-modal applications.
“From established markets such as banking and payments to emerging ones like automotive and future-looking ones including robotics, we expect to see an increase in multi-modal applications and a scenario where biometrics is a critical component of a user's digital ID in the emerging IoT ecosystem,” said Dimitrios Pavlakis, an industry analyst at ABI. “Multimodal user authentication in the internet of things will not be another gimmicky option — it will be the security norm.”
ABI said vendors in this market are advised to plan accordingly and expand their biometric portfolio depending on the choice of market vertical.
Learn more about the biometrics market from ABI Research’s Digital Security service.
