For more than For 100 years, recording people’s fingerprints involved them pressing their fingertips to a surface. This initially involved ink, but has since moved to sensors built into airport scanners and phone screens. The next stage of fingerprinting doesn’t involve touching anything at all.
The so-called contactless fingerprinting technology uses your phone’s camera and image processing algorithms to capture people’s fingerprints. Hold your hand in front of the camera lens and the software can identify and record all the lines and swirls at your fingertips. The technology, which has been in development for years, is ready to be used more widely in the real world. That includes use by police, a move that worries civil liberties and privacy groups.
Contactless fingerprinting works through several processes, says Chase Hatcher, vice president of technology at Telos, a fingerprint technology company. “The core component of this is an image processing algorithm that works with computer vision principles to transform a photograph of the fingers into a machine-matchable fingerprint,” Hatcher says.
To accurately collect someone’s fingerprints, a person’s hand needs to be about two inches from the phone’s camera, Hatcher says. From here, the company’s machine learning algorithms identify your fingertips and process the image. The system, Hatcher says, is able to detect the edges that define your fingerprint by identifying shadows and lighter areas. “We need an autofocus camera,” Hatcher says. It is possible to select fingerprints using the phone’s camera with a resolution of up to two megapixels. The result is a traditional fingerprint image that can then be matched against existing databases.
Last week, Telos was named joint winner of a US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) competition that looks at the effectiveness of contactless fingerprint systems and how they can be used by law enforcement. According to an industry title report Biometric updatethe results show that the technology is ready for wider distribution.
Contactless fingerprints are just one part of a rapidly growing biometrics industry that sells ways to collect and process the data created by our bodies. Biometric data can include facial recognition, the way you walk, the vein patterns on your wrist, and the way you sound. Among other things, the technologies are used to replace passwords and help prove your identity when opening a new bank account. Biometrics is big business, with some estimates suggesting the market could be worth $127 billion by 2030.
