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Biometric inverse problems. (English) Zbl 1078.62120

Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis/CRC Press (ISBN 0-8493-2899-3/hbk). xxvi, 386 p. (2005).
The book concerns the automated synthesis of biometric data: fingerprints, signatures, irises, speech and singing, music emotions and expressions, and at last the more general synthetic DNA. This is a handbook including about 200 examples, 200 figures, 60 problems and 50 Matlab code fragments. The authors claim that the book consists of eight self-contained chapters. However, it is difficult to decide which background in mathematics is needed. To learn the necessary mathematics from this book is very difficult, if not impossible. For example, the convolution is mentioned on pages 12, 75 and 140 (chapters 1, 2 and 3) and the definition is only on page 140 – what about self-containment? The word topology is used several times without any explanation. Metric spaces are used from time to time, but discrete topology is mentioned on page 300 without connection with anything. On page 311 one can learn that there is one-to-one correspondence between the set of generators and the set of Voronoi diagrams (the text near figure 7.7) and that in general the correspondence is many-to-one (three last lines on the same page). The above examples should be treated as a top of the iceberg.

MSC:

62P10 Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis
62-01 Introductory exposition (textbooks, tutorial papers, etc.) pertaining to statistics

Software:

Matlab
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