Recognize is a technology capable of identifying or verifying a person or something, If you recognize someone or something, you know who that person is or what that thing is, an act of recognizing or the state of being recognized. It’s also mean the identification of something as having been previously seen, heard, known, etc. and the perception of something as existing or true; realization. With the acknowledgment of something as valid or as entitled to consideration.
The key difference between identifying someone and verifying them is that identification is asking “who are you?” In biometrics terms, this known as 1-to-n matching. You’re taking the individual and comparing their biometrics to a database of possible identities in order to match them and discover their identity. This is how law enforcement and border control often uses biometrics – scanning a latent print or pulling someone’s fingerprint and running it against a database to see if it matches against a previously captured print.
Identifying someone with their biometrics in this way is very useful in many instances, but not in the average enterprise use case. When using biometrics for access control at a bank or hospital, you don’t need to identify the user, you need to see if they are who they say they are.
Verification, on the other hand, is the process of asking “are you who you say you are?” Proving your identity. This is the actual basis of access management and biometrics-based security. Whether deploying biometrics in a mobile banking app or setting up a biometric multi factor authentication system for accessing a secure server, the user will be claiming the identity of someone already known to the system. This is known as 1-to-1 matching in biometrics. I already know who you claim to be, I just need to verify that it’s true.
The best example of this is how we use biometrics with modern smartphones. Every time you use your fingerprint to unlock your smartphone, you’re verifying that it’s you against the fingerprint you previously scanned. It’s distinctly different from identifying you based on your fingerprint, and the distinction is important for security.