Slashdot Mirror
3-D Light System May Revolutionize Fingerprinting
coondoggie writes "The US Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate recently awarded almost $420,000 to a Kentucky company to further develop a contactless finger print/biometric system. The goal is a machine that can snap 10 fingerprints in high resolution in less than 10 seconds, without human intervention. This goal is beginning to look feasible. FlashScan3D is working with the University of Kentucky's Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, and has developed a technique called 'structured light illumination' (WIPO patent description), where a pattern of dots or stripes is projected onto a curved or irregular surface."
We may be turning the West into a collection of police states, but at least they'll be time-efficient police states.
Who'd have though it would ever be considered a problem if it took more than 10 seconds to take 10 finger prints...
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Why should a technology developed using a grant from the public (taxpayers) be patented? Shouldn't the folks who paid for it be able to use it freely?
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I'm going to disagree with your argument in letter but not in spirit.
Grants are a form of investment. The government is paying a company money to encourage development that they believe will improve all of society. They are no more entitled to free use of the resulting innovation any more than another investor or venture capitalist would be. Unlike most investment, a grant is essentially a gift, but they do come with certain obligations that may offset the value of the "free" money.
Good examples of this system working can be seen in the cable franchises. Local governments give a grant and monopoly to a selected cable company, with the obligation that service is made available to every single household in the region. Without the grant, the cable company may have never entered the region because the profit might have never paid off the cost of running the cable.
I'm not going to disagree with you in spirit, however, because this particular area of research has nothing to offer society. Biometrics, until we have computers above the intelligence of a human security guard, are no more secure than a plain metal key (but a whole lot more gory).
Hasn't the film industry been doing pretty much the same thing to generate 3D models of objects and people? I know the idea of projecting a grid onto an object and reconstructing the 3d data from images taken at different vantage points was thought of long ago.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Or airport fingerprint scanning. Using 10 fingers, rather than just one, should help make the "Gummie finger" forgery technique somewhat more difficult. (Previously discussed on Slashdot, and in articles such as http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-915580.html) Basically, fingerprint scanners are _all_ easily misled by fingertips made of gelatin with the fake print overlaid on them. The necessary tools are vaguely decent copies of the victim's fingerprint, such as those from police files, a printer, a bowl of gelatin, and some skill with a knife.
But fingerprint forgery turns out not to be that difficult, especially against automated systems that have to auto-correlate such semi-random shapes.