Advances in Fingerprint Technology.pdf

Introduction
More than a century has passed since Alphonse Bertillon first conceived and
then industriously practiced the idea of using body measurements for solving
crimes. 1 Just as his idea was gaining popularity, it faded into relative obscurity
because of the far more significant and practical discovery of the uniqueness
of the human fingerprint.* Soon after this discovery, many major law enforcement
departments embraced the idea of first “booking” the fingerprints of
criminals so that their records are readily available and later using leftover
fingerprint smudges (latents), so that the identity of criminals can be determined.
These agencies sponsored a rigorous study of fingerprints, developed
scientific methods for visual matching of fingerprints and strong programs/cultures
for training fingerprint experts, and applied the art of fingerprint
identification for nailing down the perpetrators.
Despite the ingenious methods improvised to increase the efficiency of
the manual method of fingerprint indexing and search, the ever-growing
demands on manual fingerprint identification quickly became overwhelming.
The manual method of fingerprint indexing resulted in a highly skewed
distribution of fingerprints into bins (types): most fingerprints fell into a few
bins and this resulted in search inefficiencies. Fingerprint training procedures
were time-intensive and slow. Further, demands imposed by painstaking
attention needed to visually match the fingerprints of varied qualities, the
tedium of monotonic nature of the work, and increasing workloads due to
a higher demand on fingerprint identification services all prompted the law
enforcement agencies to initiate research into acquiring fingerprints through
electronic media and automatic fingerprint identification based on the digital
representation of the fingerprints. These efforts have led to the development
of automatic/semi-automatic fingerprint identification systems over the past
few decades. This chapter attempts to present the current state-of-the-art in
fingerprint sensing and identification technology.
The objective is to present a high-level overview of fingerprint sensing
and matching technology so as to provide the reader with some insights into
the strengths and limitations of the automation in matching fingerprints.
Because of space limitation, the focus is only on the core technology rather
than the details of the commercial systems. The existing elaborate manual
protocols (e.g., What is a core? How are fingerprints indexed/filed in a manual
system?) are not described for similar reasons. Readers are referred to Reference
2 for an excellent exposition on these subject matters.
The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows: introduction of
emerging applications of automatic fingerprint matching and its implications;
* In 1983, the Home Ministry Office, U.K., accepted that no two individuals have the same
fingerprints.