Applications of Contactless Fingerprinting

There is an established belief that biometrics, specifically fingerprinting, was invented in 1900 by Sir Francis Galton. But in fact, the Chinese played a large role in biometrics' history. About 400 years B.C. the Chinese emperor was using his fingerprint as an official signature on the imperial documents (Onin.com). There were no cases on record identifying somebody attempting to falsify this unique signature or attempted to construct a decoy. It may well be that respectful handling of the emperor’s signature is not an indication of strength of biometric technology rather a proof that copying and cheating were not acceptable in the culture of early Chinese civilization. The major development of fingerprint technology in the form of wet-ink fingerprinting was initiated and improved for forensic applications by Scotland Yard about 100 years ago. However, the development of new fingerprinting methods has happened in recent years and continues to evolve. Fingerprint recognition technology is an integral part of criminal investigations. It is the basis for the design of numerous security systems in both private and public sector. It is also seen as an important tool for a variety of government organizations including Homeland Security, Immigration, Naturalization Services, and the Armed Forces, where fingerprinting procedures are used for recognition and verification of the identity for employees of federal departments and private contractors. In addition, the growth of the internet has made it necessary to verify the identity of individuals online. The simplest form of individual verification is the use of a password; however, this does not provide high levels of security. In the U.S., where the internet is widely used, an average citizen holds eleven passwords. Individuals tend to choose passwords that are easy to remember which makes them more vulnerable to online attacks. This is exacerbated by the fact that cybercrime is increasing. It is the recognition of this inherent security flaw which amplifies the need to use biometrics in securing network communications. After the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the need for improved and reliable fingerprint recognition technology drastically increased. We witnessed the replacement of wet ink fingerprinting by digitized contact-based methods. (S. Mil’shtein and U. Doshi, 2004) did a study which emulated the fingerprinting procedure used with computer optical scanners, it was found that on average the distance between ridges decreases about 20% when a finger is positioned on an imaging surface. Using calibrated silicon pressure sensors, the distribution of pressure across a finger was scanned pixel by pixel, and a map of average pressure distribution on a finger during fingerprint acquisition was created. This demonstrated that it is impossible to replicate the same distribution of pressure across a