Contactless fingerprinting enables high scalability by leveraging existing infrastructure, such as smartphones with internet access, that we all have. Adoption and, thus, further development of such technologies only accelerated during the pandemic. A series of advances in fingerprint image acquisition using conducive mobile phone camera systems, image processing techniques resulting in high accuracy matching performance with legacy fingerprints and systems, widespread adoption, and recognition from standards bodies generated the heat.
Contactless fingerprinting refers to acquiring and verifying fingerprints without using the type of device we’ve all become accustomed to, such as at border control. Until recently, for several reasons, placing your finger(s) on such a reader was the only way of properly acquiring or verifying a fingerprint.
Contactless fingerprint capture technology has the potential to completely reconfigure the dominant national ID registration and verification model, particularly through mobile phones. This reconfiguration would gradually replace a generation of contact-based fingerprint biometric acquisition devices. Their replacement would only require software and mobile phones; the same smartphones would also function as face-capture devices.
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