3-D Light System May Revolutionize Fingerprinting 71
coondoggie writes "The US Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate recently awarded almost $420,000 to a Kentucky company to further develop a contactless finger print/biometric system. The goal is a machine that can snap 10 fingerprints in high resolution in less than 10 seconds, without human intervention. This goal is beginning to look feasible. FlashScan3D is working with the University of Kentucky's Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments, and has developed a technique called 'structured light illumination' (WIPO patent description), where a pattern of dots or stripes is projected onto a curved or irregular surface."
Great! (Score:4, Interesting)
We may be turning the West into a collection of police states, but at least they'll be time-efficient police states.
Who'd have though it would ever be considered a problem if it took more than 10 seconds to take 10 finger prints...
patent description??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why should a technology developed using a grant from the public (taxpayers) be patented? Shouldn't the folks who paid for it be able to use it freely?
Ten seconds is too long. (Score:2, Interesting)
Ten seconds is too long. Even if we set aside the dubious government driven proposition that cataloging and numbering everyone is beneficial, the fact is, an identification system that takes ten seconds is simply not beneficial. About a second, is all it should take.
Ten seconds, people won't be sure if the device is working or not, even if it says that it is. What do you do if a program stops running for ten seconds - you are start thinking about killing it. What do you do if you can't open your car door for ten seconds? You begin to doubt the key. Even typing in a password and waiting ten seconds for a response is cause for some doubt about your password.
Ten seconds is just way too long. If you are going to fund a technology like this, then hold them to a second.
Investment, not employment (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm going to disagree with your argument in letter but not in spirit.
Grants are a form of investment. The government is paying a company money to encourage development that they believe will improve all of society. They are no more entitled to free use of the resulting innovation any more than another investor or venture capitalist would be. Unlike most investment, a grant is essentially a gift, but they do come with certain obligations that may offset the value of the "free" money.
Good examples of this system working can be seen in the cable franchises. Local governments give a grant and monopoly to a selected cable company, with the obligation that service is made available to every single household in the region. Without the grant, the cable company may have never entered the region because the profit might have never paid off the cost of running the cable.
I'm not going to disagree with you in spirit, however, because this particular area of research has nothing to offer society. Biometrics, until we have computers above the intelligence of a human security guard, are no more secure than a plain metal key (but a whole lot more gory).
Hollywood (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Touchless fingerprinting? (Score:5, Interesting)
Or airport fingerprint scanning. Using 10 fingers, rather than just one, should help make the "Gummie finger" forgery technique somewhat more difficult. (Previously discussed on Slashdot, and in articles such as http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-915580.html [cnet.com]) Basically, fingerprint scanners are _all_ easily misled by fingertips made of gelatin with the fake print overlaid on them. The necessary tools are vaguely decent copies of the victim's fingerprint, such as those from police files, a printer, a bowl of gelatin, and some skill with a knife.
But fingerprint forgery turns out not to be that difficult, especially against automated systems that have to auto-correlate such semi-random shapes.
Prior art. (Score:1, Interesting)
(Don't ask for a link, because I don't have one).
A guy I know (PhD in physics) has done this more than 20 years ago. He basically used two light sources: a "white" one and one with a black->white gradient. Then he took a black & white pictures using nothing but the two light sources. Some image divisions and there you are: a depth map of the objects on the pictures!
You can increase the quality if you use three pictures: one normal, one with a dark-> light gradient and one with a light->dark gradient.
The only thing you should be able to do is get the gradient right (the more linear the better), but that's even something he managed to do at home with a printer, and old-fashioned chemical photo camera and some brains.
At some convention at that time he demonstrated the technology showing "flying fish". That is, he pointed the device at a fish aquarium. As light sources he used infrared lamps (and infrared cameras), so the whole effect could be done in real time during day time (actually during artificial light :-) Since the water in the aquarium was trandsparent and did not behave differently when photographed with different light sources, it was practically invisible on the 3D depth maps -- hence the *flying& fish...
I don't have any links because this is a 1st hand story. I don't know if it has been published, but it was a public exhibition, so there sould be *some* records available of that -- just in case someone is going for the litigation :-)
A contour model extraction (Score:1, Interesting)
Haven't seen the illustrations but it appears on the surface (hah) that they are using a combination of well-known structured light technique to create 3d model of the hand. Then they do a mapping from 3D to 2D so they can fit legacy fingerprint databases presumably. Would be mind-numbing but they fit your fingers into little slots. But it should be realized that this can easily be mapping the entire hand not just fingertips, and doing it at a subsurface level i.e. blood vessels. And.. the next step sorry to say would be to add a simple cell or blood sampling device. Your hand will be immobilized. Personally I detest this whole thing.