Fingerprint for identification and authentication

Biometrics refers to the field of technology involving the identification, authentication, surveillance, or screening of individuals based on measurable physical and /or behavioral traits. Biometric-based systems, in their various forms, have become popular over the last few years. Unlike various token or knowledge based system, they cannot be easily compromised and are used in a variety of low or high security applications.

The use fingerprints for identification and authentication can be traced back to ancient Babylonian times, where the imprints of human fingers were found on clay tablets as part of business transactions.

A fingerprint is completely unique to an individual and stayed unchanged for lifetime. The uniqueness of fingerprints can be extracted by different features such as bifurcation, termination, singular points and pores, which are used as identification marks in fingerprint authentication system. This exclusively demonstrates that fingerprint authentication is far more accurate and efficient than any other methods of authentication.

Fingerprint can be taken and digitalized by relatively compact and cheap devise and takes only a small capacity to store a large database of information. Used fingerprint based biometric systems store a user’s fingerprint data not as an image but in the form of a template which is its compact form. The template is considered to be an accurate representation of the users biometric.

Fingerprint images typically contain between 30-50 minutiae, although prints with up to 100 minutiae have also been observed. For a match between two fingerprints s a match of 6-8 minutiae points are usually considered sufficient; however up to 12 matching points are needed for some particular law-enforcement applications.
Fingerprint for identification and authentication