Grip-pattern Recognition: Applied to a Smart Gun

This chapter provides a general introduction to this thesis. First, the background of this research will be presented. Next, we will discuss motivation of the research, basic working principle and requirements of the system, our research questions, comparison to the work done by others, and previous work done for this research. Then, the context of this research, the Secure Grip project, will be briefly described. Finally, the research approaches and outline of this thesis will be presented. 1.1 Smart guns in general The operation of guns by others than the rightful users may pose a severe safety problem. In particular, casualties occur among the police officers, whose guns are taken during a struggle and used against themselves. Research in the United States, for example, has shown that approximately 8% of police officers killed in the line of duty, were shot with their own guns [1]. One of the solutions to this problem is the application of a smart gun. “Smart gun” is a phrase used throughout this thesis for the concept of weapons that have some level of user authorization capability. Today, there are a number of smart guns under research and available on the market. According to the technologies used in the recognition system, the smart guns can be categorized into three types lockable guns, self-locking guns,