Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ncar!ames!amdahl!pacbell!belltec!jim
From: jim@belltec.UUCP (Mr. Jim's Own Logon)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.misc
Subject: Re: Finger print scanners
Summary: How it is done...
Message-ID: <343@belltec.UUCP>
Date: 10 Feb 89 15:28:01 GMT
References: <8902070629.AA01107@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <5120001@hpcvra.HP.COM>
Organization: Bell Technologies, Fremont, CA
Lines: 17


   About 4 years ago I interviewed at a company that does just this. The
unfortunate part is that I cannot remember the name, Identek or something
similar. Located in Mountain View or Palo Alto, right off of 101.

   This company owns all of the patents for the fast way of storing and
recognizing fingerprints. What they do is a laser scan of the finger, and
get a square grid of 1's and 0's, representing whether or not there is a 
ridge at that point. This company ahs been able to show that if you do a
series of horizontal and vertical checksums of these 1's and 0's that this 
series of numbers is as unique as the fingerprint itself. So all of the 
storage and searching is done on the list of checksums, and not on the
actual fingerprint bit pattern. Concept was interesting, the job wasn't.


						-Jim Wall
						 Bell Technologies, Inc.