Fingerprints (was: Re: biometrics)

Eric Murray ericm at lne.com
Mon Jan 28 19:16:58 EST 2002


On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 02:54:57PM -0700, lynn.wheeler at firstdata.com wrote:
> 
> I believe NIST published something about FBI needing 40 minutia standard
> for registration in their database.

[reasons why the FBI wants so many minutae deleted]

As an example of the real world, a couple years ago I put together
a working demo of a smartcard authenticated by a fingerprint
(the card then went on to participate in SET).  The pre-release
fingerprint chip I used would regularly grab about 20 minutae, more
like 10 on a bad scan (dirty finger, poor position, etc).

If you set the macthing parameters to require all minutae to match,
you'd get a positive (i.e. match all minutae) on about one in ten scans.


And of course the other reason for wanting such good prints is simply
that the FBI can demand them.


Eric




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