A new technology has been developed that automate the manual portion of latent fingerprint identification. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has evaluated this new technology and have had interesting results. Prototype systems evaluated by NIST performed surprisingly well for a developing technology: half of the prototypes were accurate at least 80 percent of the time and one had a near perfect score. This is a great finding. The manual identification of fingerprints takes up too much time. Automating the manual portion of the work frees up time for trained examiners to spend time on very difficult images that the software has little hope of processing. In the past, there was a long process for identifying latent fingerprints. A fingerprint examiner had to carefully mark distinguishing features on a full or partial print. Then the print is entered into a database, such as the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS). Then, more manual identification follows after IAFIS comes up with some possible matches. With the new technology, Automated Feature Extraction and Matching (AFEM), less time will be spent by fingerprint examiners. The technology does most of the work and does it successfully. This new technology could have countless advantages, but Patrick Grother, a computer scientist explains, “While the testing has demonstrated accuracy beyond pre-test expectations, the potential of the technology remains undefined and further testing is required.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090423105856.htm
1 comment:
I thought that this article was well written and very informative. I think that it's really interesting to see how much technology has improved so that people can now identify fingerprints through the use of new automated techniques. I liked how Emma explained the old process how it could be improved by the new technology. Also, it was good to point out how even though this new technology is groundbreaking, testing still needs to be done before it can be deemed one hundred percent reliable. Overall, i thought that the summary was very good.
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