(Imagen 4)
Posted on my free Substack account: https://open.substack.com/pub/johnebredehoft/p/friction-ridge-isnt-a-western-movie
Tag Archives: fingerprint
Contactless Changes
(Wildebeest hoofprint contactless capture via Imagen 3)
(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
I can’t tell you why, but I’m performing some intensive research on contactless fingerprint capture. This is a topic I addressed here in 2021 and again in 2022.
As part of my research, I ran across a more recent white paper issued by the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement.
The white paper is entitled “Contactless: The Next Step in Fingerprinting Technology.”
Before I downloaded the white paper, I saw the author: Kaustubh Deshpande.
Kaustubh Deshpande? know that guy. We worked together at MorphoTrak and IDEMIA for a decade.
In fact, the IDGA page lists Deshpande’s IDEMIA affiliation.
Although by the time the paper was published on the IDGA website on February 10, 2025, Deshpande had already left IDEMIA to accept a position at HID.
Everything must change.
Forgot About Faulds
Nowadays, everybody wanna say that they got big TED talks
But nothin’ comes out when they press their fingers
Just a bunch of gibberish
And CSIs act like they forgot about Faulds
And my N. P. E. Bredemarket Instagram metabot forgot too.
But at least he didn’t cite Gabe Guo.
And I don’t have a rap career.
Frictionless Friction Ridges and Other Biometric Modalities
I wanted to write a list of the biometric modalities for which I provide experience.
So I started my usual list from memory: fingerprint, face, iris, voice, and DNA.
Then I stopped myself.
My experience with skin goes way beyond fingerprints, since I’ve spent over two decades working with palm prints.
(Can you say “Cambridgeshire method”? I knew you could. It was a 1990s method to use the 10 standard rolled fingerprint boxes to input palm prints into an automated fingerprint identification system. Because Cambridgeshire had a bias to action and didn’t want to wait for the standards folks to figure out how to enter palm prints. But I digress.)
So instead of saying fingerprints, I thought about saying friction ridges.
But there are two problems with this.
First, many people don’t know what “friction ridges” are. They’re the ridges that form on a person’s fingers, palms, toes, and feet, all of which can conceivably identify individuals.
But there’s a second problem. The word “friction” has two meanings: the one mentioned above, and a meaning that describes how biometric data is captured.
From https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XhWFHKWCSE.
No, there is not a friction method to capture faces. Squishing
- If you have to do something to provide your biometric data, such as press your fingers against a platen, that’s friction.
- If you don’t have to do anything other than wave your fingers, hold your fingers in the air, or show your face as you stand near or walk by a camera, that’s frictionless.
More and more people capture friction ridges with frictionless methods. I did this years ago using MorphoWAVE at MorphoTrak facilities, and I did it today at Whole Foods Market.
So I could list my biometric modalities as friction ridge (fingerprint and palm print via both friction and frictionless capture methods), face, iris, voice, and DNA.
But I won’t.
Anyway, if you need content, proposal, or analysis assistance with any of these modalities, Bredemarket can help you. Book a meeting at https://bredemarket.com/cpa/
MFB = Multi Factor Biasification?
There’s a paper from Itiel Dror that I need to read. Its title is “Biased and Biasing: The Hidden Bias Cascade and Bias Snowball Effects.”
Here is a portion of the abstract:
“Cognitive bias…impacts each and every aspect of the justice and legal systems, from the initial engagement of police officers attending the crime scene, through the forensic examination, and all the way to the final outcome of the jurors’ verdict and the judges’ sentencing. It impacts not only the subjective elements in the justice and legal systems but also the more objective scientific elements, such as forensic fingerprinting and DNA….[S]uch errors in the final outcome rarely occur because they require that the shortcomings in each element be coordinated and aligned with the other elements. However, in the justice and legal systems, the different elements are not independent; they are coordinated and mutually support and bias each other, creating and enabling hidden bias cascade and bias snowball effects.”
Wanted Dead or Live
The 2nd Amendment Zone in Upland, California offers livescan fingerprinting services, presumably for both federal and state purposes.
Although I don’t know if their machines work after you have been fatally shot. There’s a reason why they call it liveness detection.
TMA (Too Many Acronyms): DPI vs. DPI
I recently wrote a post that concluded as follows:
By the way, when talking about digital images, Adobe notes that the correct term is pixels per inch, not dots per inch. DPI specifically refers to printer resolution, which is appropriate when you’re printing a fingerprint card but not when you’re displaying an image on a screen.
It’s a safe bet that older readers of Biometric Update—those who used printers to print out fingerprint cards based upon captured digital images—are familiar with the DPI (dots per inch) acronym.
So perhaps those readers, like me, were confused by the title of a recent Biometric Update article, “DPI is the new ‘global tech bet’ and these are the five core motivations for adoption, researchers say.”
What happened to the paperless office? All the police agencies got rid of their file cabinets of cards, and now they’re supposed to adopt DPI again?
Well you know sometimes acronyms have two meanings.
In this case, DPI stands for digital public infrastructure, a key component of smart cities.
And those five core components are fiscal resilience, public services, economic development, national sovereignty, and competition and rent extraction.
Although you would think that SMART people could come up with a better term than rent EXTRACTION.
For more information on those core components, read the Biometric Update “DPI” article.
And no, I shouldn’t cast stones at acronym misuse, since I’m a self-identified CPA. You can’t account for hypocrisy.
More on Infant Biometrics
Since I recently shared some news on “Baby Steps Toward Order of Magnitude Increases in Fingerprint Resolution,” I figure I should share what Integrated Biometrics has to say on the matter.
In its article “The Science of Infant Biometrics: Are We Really There Yet?” Integrated Biometrics identifies three key components for success: capture, storage, and matching. Since the Bredemarket blog has previously discussed capture, I’ll quote a bit of what Integrated Biometrics has to say about it.
[I]nfant fingerprints have smaller ridge spacing (roughly) 4-5 pixels compared to 9-10 in adults). Movement, skin peeling, and soft, malleable skin can also distort the fingerprint, making it difficult to capture accurate data.
Because of that size, the company cites studies that suggest a capture resolution of 3500 ppi and beyond may be necessary.
But that’s not the biggest of the three key components. The biggest one is matching, because even if you capture the best infant image, it’s of no use if it doesn’t correctly match (or not match) against adult images.
Luckily, we’re now at the point where we’re starting to get data for the same person at infant and (near) adult ages, so we can study the issue. Integrated Biometrics’ post contains more detail in the section “Can Today’s Algorithms Track Biometric Evolution from Infancy to Adulthood?” I’ll direct you there to read about it.
(Image from Freepik)
Baby Steps Toward Order of Magnitude Increases in Fingerprint Resolution
(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
For many years, the baseline for high-quality capture of fingerprint and palm print images has been to use a resolution of 500 pixels per inch. Or maybe 512 pixels per inch. Whatever.
The crime scene (latent) folks weren’t always satisfied with this, so they pushed to capture latent fingerprint and latent palm print images at 1000 pixels per inch. Pardon me, 1024.
But beyond this, the resolution of captured prints hasn’t really changed in decades. I’m sure some people have been capturing prints at 2000 (2048) pixels per inch, but there aren’t massive automated biometric identification systems that fully support this resolution from end to end.
But that may be changing.
One important truth about infant fingerprints
For about as long as latent examiners have pursued 1000 ppi print capture, people outside of the criminal justice arena have been looking at fingerprints for a very different purpose.
Our normal civil fingerprint processes require us to identify people via fingerprints beginning at the age of 18, or perhaps at the age of 12.
But gow do we identify people in those first 12 years?
More specifically, can we identify someone via their fingerprints at birth, and then authenticate them as an adult by comparing to those original prints?
It’s a dream, but many have pursued this dream. Dr. Anil Jain at Michigan State University has pursued this for years, and co-authored a 2014 paper on the topic.
Given that children, as well as the adults, in low income countries typically do not have any form of identification documents which can be used for this purpose [vaccination], we address the following question: can fingerprints be effectively used to recognize children from birth to 4 years? We have collected 1,600 fingerprint images (500 ppi) of 20 infants and toddlers captured over a 30-day period in East Lansing, Michigan and 420 fingerprints of 70 infants and toddlers at two different health clinics in Benin, West Africa.
At the time, it probably made sense to use 500 pixel per inch scanners to capture the prints, since developing countries don’t have a lot of money to throw around on expensive 1000 ppi scanners. But the use of regular scanners runs counter to a very important truth about infants and their fingerprints. Are you sitting down?
Because infants are smaller than adults, infant fingerprints are smaller than adult fingerprints.
Think about it. The standard FBI fingerprint card assumes that a rolled fingerprint occupies 1.6 inches x 1.5 inches of space. If you were to roll an infant fingerprint, it would occupy much less than that. Heck, I don’t even know if an infant’s entire FINGER is 1.6 inches long.
So the capture device is obtaining these teeny tiny ridges, and these teeny tiny ridge endings, and these teeny tiny bifurcations. Or trying to. And if those second-level details can’t be captured, then you’re not going to get the minutiae, and your fingerprint matching is going to fail.
So a decade later, researchers today are adopting a newer approach, according to a Biometric Update summary of an ID4Africa webinar. (This particular portion is at the very end of the webinar, at around the 2 hour 40 minute mark.)
A video presentation from Judge Lidia Maejima of the Court of Justice of Parana, Brazil introduced the emerging legal framework for biometric identification of infants. Her representative Felipe Hay explained how researchers in Brazil developed 5,000 dpi scanners, he says, which accurately record the minutiae of infants’ fingerprints.
Did you capture that? We’re moving from five hundred pixels per inch to FIVE THOUSAND pixels per inch. (Or maybe 5120.) Whether even that resolution is capable of capturing infant fingerprint detail remains to be seen.
And as Dr. Joseph Atick noted, all this research is still in its…um…infancy. We won’t know for years whether the algorithms can truly match infant fingerprints to child or adult fingerprints.
By the way, when talking about digital images, Adobe notes that the correct term is pixels per inch, not dots per inch. DPI specifically refers to printer resolution, which is appropriate when you’re printing a fingerprint card but not when you’re displaying an image on a screen.
(Image from From https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.SP.500-290e3.pdf )
Biometric Update: Thales wins $21m contract for Switzerland’s AFIS
Notable. I don’t know if IDEMIA provides the current Swiss AFIS (it used to), but Thales has locked this up for a long time.
Bredemarket 