Austria has presented a smartphone-based system for contactless fingerprint capture, already in use by its police, at a United Nations event on the responsible use of biometrics in border and counter-terrorism work.
The technology, called BioCapture, was developed by the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology together with the Criminal Intelligence Service Austria (CIS) at the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the software company T3K, and the University of Salzburg, with funding from the national KIRAS security research programme. It captures four fingers from both hands using a standard smartphone camera in less than thirty seconds, then runs an automated, encrypted query against national and, in future, European Automated Fingerprint Identification Systems. The biometric data is transmitted in encrypted form, and no fingerprint data is stored on the phone.
Contactless fingerprint capture, which lets a camera stand in for a traditional contact scanner, has drawn steady development on the commercial side as well, including work by Integrated Biometrics and Sciometrics on contactless fingerprint technology. Austria has rolled BioCapture out nationally, letting officers establish identities at the scene and check them against national databases within a short time, and plans to make it available to all police through the interior ministry’s Mobile Police Communication application.
The system was shown on July 2 at a UN Counter-Terrorism Week side event in New York organised by the UN Counter-Terrorism Centre, the International Organization for Migration, the AIT, and the Austrian interior ministry, in cooperation with INTERPOL. Officials there argued that biometric tools must operate within a clear framework grounded in the rule of law and human rights. AIT and the interior ministry said BioCapture was built on a “responsible by design” approach, taking data protection, information security, and legal and ethical requirements into account from the development stage, and that it supports identity verification within existing legal powers rather than replacing human decision-making.
Andreas Holzer, Director of the Criminal Intelligence Service Austria, presented the system from a policing perspective and pointed to its significance when used alongside new European biometric identity systems, as the bloc builds out shared border databases such as the Entry/Exit System. “Mobile contactless fingerprint capture is another important step towards modern and efficient police work,” Holzer said.
Sources: AIT Austrian Institute of Technology
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
