Fingerprint Sensors Can Help Identify Disaster Victims Much Faster: Researchers

A new technical review from France’s Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale highlights the benefits of fingerprint biometrics technology in forensic investigations, and of Integrated Biometrics’ fingerprint sensors in particular.

The Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale is the French Gendarmerie’s forensic laboratory, and tasked itself with assessing technology used by the Gendarmerie’s Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) Squad. It tested the Squad’s Fingerprint DVI Toolkit, which makes use of Integrated Biometrics sensors and MorphoBis AFIS software to identify the fingerprints of the victims of disasters such as terrorist attacks. The results from Integrated Biometrics’ Kojak, Sherlock, and Watson Mini sensors were assessed against each other, and against traditional fingerprint identification methods.

All of the identification methods received the same overall scores in assessments of their ability to obtain quality fingerprint images. But there was one salient difference between the Integrated Biometrics sensors and the traditional identification methods: the former were much faster.

The Institut asserts that “electroluminescent sensors are of great interest” in its Technical Note. “They not only offer a sufficient quality image but they also significantly reduce the processing time”, the researchers say, adding later that “the use of any sensor resulted in significant time savings while ensuring sufficient results to perform identifications”.

What’s more, in the case of one of the four corpses used as subjects in the study, the deterioration of its fingers offered a particular challenge, yet an Integrated Biometrics fingerprint sensor was able to match it against a national database in less than two minutes, compared to the 18 minutes that identification took using traditional methods.

This isn’t to say that electroluminescent sensors are preferable in all cases, with the researchers noting that particularly degraded prints may require the technical expertise of a human investigator. But such sensors otherwise offer “significantly reduced” processing times, helping the DVI Squad do its job faster and more effectively.

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June 1, 2020 – by Alex Perala