What is the Windows Biometric Framework?

If you want to introduce biometric identification features to your Windows or .NET applications, then you can leverage the Windows Biometric Framework and API. Biometrics can be used to uniquely identify us humans based on physical characteristics, such as fingerprints, eye's iris patterns and tone of voice.

The idea of the Windows Biometric Framework is to consolidate different devices of this kind to a common set of interfaces that programming is easier. A related concept is the sensor pool, which is further organized into three sub-pools: the private pool, the system sensor pool and the unassigned pool.

The Win32 API functions start with the name "WinBio". For instance, WinBioIdentify, WinBioOpenSession and WinBioEnumBiometricUnits.

For more information, see the documentation on MSDN.