Repeatability of Contactless and Contact Fingerprint Capture

Published

September 12, 2023

Author(s)

John M. Libert, Shahram Orandi, John Grantham, Kenneth Ko, Bruce Bandini

Abstract

A new generation of contactless fingerprint capture devices has recently emerged. These devices provide the ability to capture a fingerprint without making physical contact with the finger. There is anecdotal evidence that the process of capturing a fingerprint by making contact with it also introduces a certain amount of physical distortion to the finger being pressed against the collection medium. It is hypothesized that because contactless collection devices do not need to make physical contact with the finger bring captured, the resulting collections from contactless devices are expected to have no mechanical deformation introduced to the finger and provide better intraoperability and as well as better consistency between captures from the same device. This hypothesis was rejected in that observations in this study showed that contact collection devices have more consistency and less variability between successive captures using the same device.

Citation

NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR) - 8488

Report Number

8488

NIST Pub Series

NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR)

Pub Type

NIST Pubs

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8488

Local Download

Keywords

Contactless fingerprint, fingerprint, minutiae displacement, SIVV, skin distortion, Spectral Validation Verification Metric, Structural Similarity Index Metric, SSIM.

Citation

Libert, J. , Orandi, S. , Grantham, J. , Ko, K. and Bandini, B. (2023), Repeatability of Contactless and Contact Fingerprint Capture, NIST Interagency/Internal Report (NISTIR), National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, [online], https://doi.org/10.6028/NIST.IR.8488, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=936774 (Accessed October 14, 2025)