Patent ID: 8577090

Claim:
A biometric authentication method of an individual to be authenticated amongst a very large quantity of individuals with an authentication system storing a set of reference information, each associated to one of said individuals, said reference information being distributed across a plurality of sub-databases, comprising: a phase of adding reference information representative of a new individual in one of said sub-databases, comprising: a step of selecting the sub-database that is best adapted to store said reference information to be added, said reference information being representative of said new individual, and said sub-database being selected according to a criterion of maximizing a distance between the reference information that is already present in said sub-database and said reference information to be added, in order to avoid risk of authentication errors between individuals already referenced in said sub-database and said new individual, and a step of providing said new individual with an identifier forming addressing information and corresponding to an index of said selected sub-database; and a phase of authentication of said individual to be authenticated comprising the following steps: provision by said individual to be authenticated of authentication biometric information and of an identifier forming addressing information, designating at least one of said sub-databases likely to contain the reference information representative of said individual to be authenticated; and searching amongst said reference information stored by said authentication system, of reference information corresponding to said individual to be authenticated, according to said authentication biometric information, said searching being carried out on a subset of said set of reference information, identified by said addressing information.