Fingerprint biometrics are integral to digital authentication and forensic science. However, they are based on the unproven assumption that no two fingerprints, even from different fingers of the same person, are alike. This renders them useless in scenarios where the presented fingerprints are from different fingers than those on record. Contrary to this prevailing assumption, we show above 99.99% confidence that fingerprints from different fingers of the same person share very strong similarities. Using deep twin neural networks to extract fingerprint representation vectors, we find that these similarities hold across all pairs of fingers within the same person, even when controlling for spurious factors like sensor modality. We also find evidence that ridge orientation, especially near the fingerprint center, explains a substantial part of this similarity, whereas minutiae used in traditional methods are almost nonpredictive. Our experiments suggest that, in some situations, this relationship can increase forensic investigation efficiency by almost two orders of magnitude.
Unveiling intra-person fingerprint similarity via deep contrastive learning
Gabriel Guo,Aniv Ray,Miles Izydorczak,Judah Goldfeder,Hod Lipson,Wenyao Xu
Published 2024 in Science Advances
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- Publication year
2024
- Venue
Science Advances
- Publication date
2024-01-12
- Fields of study
Medicine, Computer Science
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Semantic Scholar, PubMed
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