What are Fingerprints?

Fingerprints are the tiny ridges, whorls and valley patterns on the tip of each finger. They form from pressure on a baby's tiny, developing fingers in the womb. No two people have been found to have the same fingerprints — they are totally unique. There's a one in 64 billion chance that your fingerprint will match up exactly with someone else's. Fingerprints are even more unique than DNA, the genetic material in each of our cells. Although identical twins can share the same DNA — or at least most of it -- they can't have the same fingerprints.

What is Fingerprint Recognition?

Fingerprint identification is one of the most well-known and publicized biometrics. Because of their uniqueness and consistency over time, fingerprints have been used for identification for over a century, more recently becoming automated (i.e. a biometric) due to advancements in computing capabilities. Fingerprint identification is popular because of the inherent ease in acquisition, the numerous sources (ten fingers) available for collection, and their established use and collections by law enforcement and immigration.

History

There are records of fingerprints being taken many centuries ago, although they weren't nearly as sophisticated as they are today. The ancient Babylonians pressed the tips of their fingertips into clay to record business transactions. The Chinese used ink-on-paper finger impressions for business and to help identify their children.

However, fingerprints weren't used as a method for identifying criminals until the 19th century. In 1858, an Englishman named Sir William Herschel was working as the Chief Magistrate of the Hooghly district in Jungipoor, India. In order to reduce fraud, he had the residents record their fingerprints when signing business documents.

Today, digital scanners capture an image of the fingerprint. To create a digital fingerprint, a person places his or her finger on an optical or silicon reader surface and holds it there for a few seconds. The reader converts the information from the scan into digital data patterns. The computer then maps points on the fingerprints and uses those points to search for similar patterns in the database.

Technical Algorithm

Although hands and feet have many ridged areas that could be used for identification, fingerprints became a popular form of biometrics because they are easy to classify and sort. They're also accessible.

The foundation of fingerprint algorithm is based on the verification and matching by the features of fingerprint images and their related information. With year's effort of various enterprises and research organizations, different digital algorithms have been generated. Although algorithms differ, they are all categorized as the identification and matching of the features found in fingerprint images. There are two kinds of fingerprint features for verification and matching: General Features and Partial Features.

General Features

Refers to the visually identifiable features, including:

1.Fingerprint Patterns

Other fingerprint patterns are based on these 3 basic patterns: Loop, Whorls and Arches. Only identifying fingerprints with fingerprint pattern is only a general categorization which is far from precise, a detailed classification enables quicker and more precise search of fingerprints in big-data database.

Obviously, based on different digital algorithm, there are no possibilities of different 3rd parties to obtain user identities reversely.

ZKTeco offers own intelligent property rights based algorithms, in the meantime our templates are privately owned, ZKTeco never releases algorithms and template formats to any 3rd party, the reliability of ZKTeco algorithms is based on our 20-year algorithm development experience and the database with integration of up to 10 million fingerprint images, in every year up to a million time & attendance and access control devices have presented our international standard quality of matching passing rate, matching consistency and algorithm preciseness.