An Approach to Reduce the Storage Requirement for Biometric Data in Aadhar Project

AADHAR is an Indian Government Project to provide unique identification to each Citizen of India. The objective of the project is to collect all the personal details and the biometric traits from each individual. Biometric traits such as iris, face and fingerprint are being collected for authentication. All the information will be stored in a centralized data repository. Considering about the storage requirement for the biometric data of the entire population of India, approximately 20,218 TB of storage space will be required. Since 10 fingerprint data are stored, fingerprint details will take most of the space. In this paper, the storage requirement for the biometric data in the AADHAR project is analyzed and a method is proposed to reduce the storage by cropping the original biometric image before storing. This method can reduce the storage space of the biometric data drastically. All the measurements given in this paper are approximate only.