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."
Touchless fingerprinting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Like RFID-loaded passports and cameras at sports arenas, this technology only seems useful at violating our privacy remotely.
We are talking about Chinese Democracy a few stories below. What scares me more than Chinese Democracy (and Axl's hairplugs) is American Fascism.
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I don't see any mention of taking prints remotely. This just appears to be a faster, more accurate, and less messy way to take prints than the traditional ink system.
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Indeed, they stopped using ink about 10 years ago (even here in Australia). You might find smaller out of the way police stations in outback towns with paper & ink, but not in big cities.
This is most definitely for gathering prints without the subject realising.
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.
Oh, boy! (Score:3, Funny)
The US Department of Homeland Security's Science & Technology Directorate...
Stop right there. Already, I don't like it!
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Interesting summary. If there is no human intervention, whose fingerprints are snapped?
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Interesting summary. If there is no human intervention, whose fingerprints are snapped?
Everyone's.
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...
Re:Great! (Score:4, Insightful)
Think border control and the DHS's "tourists are terrorists" programs (not the official name, of course).
Re:Great! (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, that's what my "police state" comment was referring to. Of course, why stop there? They might catch even more terrorists if they take more fingerprints.
Fingerprinting for Freedom! Did you already give a fingerprint today? Your fingerprint too could belong to a terrorist, so get fingerprinted now! Never forget: fingerprint early, and fingerprint often!
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Never mind when the fingerprint database is hacked, or lost, or sold for advertising, or shared with another state...
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Think border control and the DHS's "tourists are terrorists" programs (not the official name, of course).
Damn, that is perfect. Did you think of that up on your own?
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Balanced on the head of a pin is also an equilibrium state. But it is inherently unstable.
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We may be turning the West into a collection of police states, but at least they'll be time-efficient police states.
On the other hand, fingerprint analysis [wikipedia.org] will probably remain a slow, laborious and error-prone process.
An efficient police state is a happy police state, (Score:2)
ya know?
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Who'd have thought you'd want to fingerprint every tourist entering getting off a plane.
no.. that's not the issue (Score:2)
they'll improve the technology up to blink scanning, like drive thru ez-pass.
any public place will be subject to pass-by scanners
and paying merchants cash to avoid deep data mining won't work anymore-
wearing gloves will get you searched.
Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
It takes about two seconds per finger. So, assuming they want all ten fingers it takes 20 seconds per-person. Add the time to explain how it all works let's say it takes a minute per-person. Lets say that 857,191 [flychicago.com] international travelers come through a busy airport in a given month. Since it's December that's an average of 27,651.32 per-day which is 460.85 man-hours, just for finger-printing.
Do the same calculation for the year (11,486,547/60=191442.45). Then multiply that by the cost of each employee (wages, payroll taxes, benefits, worker's comp, insurance (for stuff other than worker's benefits), etc), it's a HUGE amount of money just for finger printing every year at one busy airport (granted it is the busiest airport, but I doubt it's the busiest in terms of international travelers). If a $100,000 computer system can automate that it's a bargain (pays for itself in less than a month, not counting running costs, which can't be much).
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People! Yes, you too [slashdot.org]! Please stop going along with the whole "if we're going to collectively act like idiots, lets at least act like a collective of efficient idiots"-bullcrap that I was trying to point out (but apparently not clearly enough).
I was simply trying to express the sentiment that once upon a time (e.g., in the distant past of about 10 years ago), the only people that got fingerprinted where subjects of active investigations (give or take a few occasional abuses by law enforcement). And that ther
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3D Light! (Score:2, Insightful)
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i understood 2D and terrorists. those nasty terrorists have gone paper mario now?
--
actually, i could find an "intelligent design" in there too. christian, razor-sharp terrorist? jeez!
I hear they have these things called scanners now. (Score:4, Insightful)
Step 1: Place fingers on scanner
Step 2: Tell scanner to scan fingers
Step 3: ????
Step 4: Police State!
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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?
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).
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I'm not going to disagree with you in spirit, however, because this particular area of research has nothing to offer society.
That's what they said about quantum physics and computers.
I'd consider instant reliable 3D scanning generic enough to start playing around with.
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Yeah, why are they using this tech for something as boring as fingerprints?
They could be scanning supermodels [imdb.com].
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Biometrics, until we have computers above the intelligence of a human security guard,
Well, some of the customs / immigration people I've met over the years make even my blackberry look smart.
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The main reason to patent publicly funded work is to prevent anybody from restricting access to that work. I'm not saying that this patent is supposed to be used for that purpose, but other work [google.com] has been patented specifically to ensure that anyone can use the technology without restriction (as the dedication on the referenced patent indicates).
Conctactless fingerprint reader (Score:2)
There have been some attempts at contactless fingerprint readers for access control. The idea is to read from a distance of 1cm or so, rather than with the finger pressed up against the glass. This prevents dirt on the glass from messing up the image. In the 1990s, contactless devices were too expensive or too complicated. Now, they're probably feasible.
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*goes back to watching too many movies*
How will this stop child porn (Score:2)
Will this help stop child porn on P2P networks, or help arrest teenagers who make off-handed comments about wanting to kill their classmates?
If it doesn't do either of those things, I fail to see why law enforcement is interested.
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 do
Misspelling (Score:1, Redundant)
This goal is beginning to lok feasible.
I thank you misspelled a word.
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And if they had 80 of these devices, that's only 1 continuous year. If they had ~80k they could do the entire population in a single 8 hour day. Never underestimate the ability of the government to waste money invading our privacy.
Structured lighting (Score:3, Informative)
Structured lighting techniques are, in general, well known. The question is more whether the specific technique they're claiming is known or not.
Hollywood (Score:3, Interesting)
Drunk, mayhaps? (Score:2)
10 Steps Ahead Of DHS..... (Score:2)
Looks like my $10 pair of gloves beats their $420,000 fingerprinting device.....
Me: 1,275 DHS: 0
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Looks like my $10 pair of gloves beats their $420,000 fingerprinting device.....
Me: 1,275 DHS: 0
Putting my hands in my pockets for free beats their $420,000 device.
This is why (Score:1)
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 gra
standard engineering technique (Score:3, Informative)
First of all, the patent captures hands, not fingerprints. More importantly, structured light is a standard technique for 3D capture that's in widespread use and has been around for decades. If you want to capture the 3D shape of hands, it's the obvious engineering solution.
Wait a minute... (Score:2)
Doesn't everybody in Kentucky have the same fingerprints?
sorry!
wear gloves (Score:2)
you could conceivably now be fingerprinted at a distance, were this tech highly perfected
drive by fingerprinting
a cop cruiser could just do driving patterns in a neighborhood of interest, fingerprinting everyone they drive by, until they find a match
Source (Score:1)
I could see this technology useful for datacenters. However, considering the source I am hesitant to believe it was developed for such a honest purpose.
Old tech, new coat of paint (Score:1)
"structured light illumination" New? (Score:1, Informative)
structured light illumination is older than the internet. They can't patent it.
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 t