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3D Fingerprinting — Touchless, More Accurate, and Faster
kkleiner writes "For all the glory it gets, the fingerprint has evolved very little in the last 60 years. They’re still two dimensional. The US Department of Homeland Security and the National Institute of Justice are hoping to change that. They've given grants to dozens of companies to perfect touchless 3D fingerprinting. Two universities (University of Kentucky and Carnegie Mellon) and their two respective start-up companies (Flashscan 3D and TBS Holdings) have succeeded. Fingerprints have reached the third dimension and they are faster, more accurate, and touchless."
There is probably no scientific evidence relied upon unquestionably, that has such serious issues regarding accuracy as fingerprinting. Check this out.
Fingerprinting technology is only useful to the man, for keeping you down.
Ever since Men in black, I have been waiting for the shiny fingerprint removing sphere.
Where the hell is it! And where's my flying car.
I came here to either find or make this comment. Good job. Police and prosecutors build their careers on convictions. They have a vested interest in the public believing in the infallibility of fingerprinting. I find this paragraph from the New Scientist article to be key in understanding the controversy of fingerprinting:
No one disputes that fingerprinting is a valuable and generally reliable police tool, but despite more than a century of use, fingerprinting has never been scientifically validated. This is significant because of the criteria governing the admission of scientific evidence in the US courts.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Did you take an international flight into or out of the US lately? If so, you are in the database with all the "bad people".
As for computational intensity, CPU cycles are cheaper than dirt, and getting even cheaper than that by the minute.
You're not old until regret takes the place of your dreams.
False positives are worse; it is better that 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man suffer.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Every optical mouse has both a light source and a digital camera, yet they cost $20. A 3-D fingerprint scanner requires probably one extra camera. If they build 100 per year, they'll cost thousands of dollars. If they build a million, they'll be under $100.
I started a company doing EDA and ASIC IP, but at the time, my favorite second alternative (back in 1999), was building a 3-D scanner out of 2 digital cameras and some software. I wanted to scan women so they could load a fairly accurate body shape onto an online avatar, and preview how clothing would look on them. Now, for best results, the ladies would need to spin naked in front of the device. I was really looking forward to debugging that technology :-)
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
When talking about convictions, yes. False positives are worse. When talking about investigations, false negatives are worse. A false positive during an investigation means that you spend a little time and resources investigating and proving somebody's innocense. A false negative during an investigation means that you might let the guilty party walk free, uninvestigated, because you don't believe they're the one.
In an ideal world, at least. :) In the real world, things are never so cut/dry as that.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
If John worked for the federal government or many state governments in ANY CAPACITY, they are on file. Jane Q Public has a far lower chance of having fingerprints on file simply because far fewer Janes than Johns serve in the military. As a college intern I worked for the Forest service. As soon as I had been there 90 days it was down to the cop-shop for printing. That put my life of crime on hold.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Great, so all I have to do is soak my fingers in water for awhile.
> For all the glory it gets, the fingerprint has evolved very little in the
> last 60 years.
Is there a type of fingerprint that has a selective advantage? I would think you'd do better with ones like everyone else's. Perhaps after 2000 generations of CSI we'll all have identical prints.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
> The article did not say the price, unless I missed it, but I can say its
> going to be a hell of alot more than a bit of ink and a piece of paper. And
> what is the point? Fingerprints on stuff are already 2D, why do we need to
> check 2D against 3D?
Speed and accuracy. The market is biometrics, not CSI.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Right, but the software won't flatten the print quite the way pressing the finger against an object would.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Right, but the software won't flatten the print quite the way pressing the finger against an object would.
The fact that they state that their flattened prints are able to integrate with the FBI database clearly means that this isn't a problem. Hell, real-life fingerprints flatten differently against different objects, so it's not like this is some new constraint, and at least the flattening process of the 3D scanner is predictable and repeatable. In short, I don't think this will be an issue.
I pick my nose before I get my finger prints done, in front of the fingerprint tech. This new development is going to cramp my style.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
What's the rate of false positives? If you say there aren't any, I'll know you're lying.
The correct answer is "Nobody knows, and the research to calculate it isn't allowed."
For normal finger prints this could have been calculated decades ago, but the necessary agencies have consistently refused to permit their techniques to be evaluated. (Others have said that informal estimates show up to a 20% error rate [varies with the lab and the time period...low estimate was 3%]. I think was was being investigated was false negatives, though. I don't know the study, so I can't say for sure. This was reported to be based on voluntary cooperation of the fingerprinting labs, though, so the real numbers are probably higher.)
(OTOH, the study reports may be someone's invention. I haven't seen it. I do know that there had been no official evaluation the last time I looked into the matter [a few years ago].)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The real question for me is, are these things less susceptible to gummi / jello fingers than 2D scanners? Seems like they would be equally susceptible, and therefore equally weak as a door lock.
Interesting. Validating fingerprinting would be pretty trivial, given access to a large database of fingerprints.
Or, am I being too picky?
No, you're being too pedantic. And so am I.
You just got troll'd!