Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

BACKGROUND: Fingerprint recognition has become accepted as a valid personal identification method and for routine use in forensics since the early twentieth century. The technology allows identification and authentication of individuals based on the characteristics of their fingerprints. This has led many governments to choose fingerprint as a supplement to existing identification schemes, namely ID cards and passports. Since fingerprint identification systems and sensors vary, a fingerprint acquired through each one of the systems has different characteristics, and may not be compatible with each other. Fingerprints compatibility in different systems is a tough problem for government and criminal fingerprint database. As fingerprints become more prevalent, the question of their permanence arises. RESEARCH FOCUS: One common issue is that no large-scale, longitudinal studies exist to test if fingerprints are constant over aging, growth spurts and in old age. This is a major concern as fingerprint permanence has been taken as a given without any research to substantiate the claims. No studies have been conducted to see if a fingerprint image enrolled at early age is still comparable at the later age without template updating during the use hiatus. If permanence is not found, this research will help develop new re-enrollment policies, as to not sacrifice the performance and throughput of the system, by giving timelines for which given ages should reenroll. GOAL: The study will conduct systematic testing of the permanence of fingerprint biometric features as a function of age, time difference between acquisitions, and fingerprint capture and match technology. We will leverage data from large-scale studies as a baseline and then collect recurring data from this group yearly over the course of 3 years. This will allow for a broad spectrum of ages to be compared, giving more definitive results on the impact of aging. This will also allow the analysis of aging at the individual level for the target populations. This knowledge will be transferred to the Canadian industry, which will then benefit the biometric market of Canada.