Consumer applications in biometric technology represent 66 percent of today's total hardware biometric market verses just 2 percent in 2010, according to a new report by Yole Développement.

The market is set to grow at a 10 percent compound annual growth rate from 2016 to 2021. Biometric solutions’ growth will be supported by a 6.4 percent compound annual growth rate of smartphone units between 2015 and 2021. In 2015, 525 million fingerprint sensor units were sold.

“At Yole, we expect a huge increase up to 1,500 million [1.5 billion] units by 2021,” said Guillaume Girardin, technology and market analyst at Yole. “By 2021, fingerprint sensing won’t be the unique biometric solution embedded in a smartphone; the advent of multimodal recognition is on the verge to conquer the consumer market.”

Yole Développement is a market research and strategy consulting company.