Neurotechnology’s contactless fingerprint capture technology has met the first-phase qualification requirements of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Fast Capture (FastCAP) program. NIST lists the Lithuanian company among 13 vendors whose systems passed tests under its framework for evaluating fingerprints acquired without a contact scanner.
The company’s method uses a smartphone camera to record fingerprints without requiring a person to press their fingers onto a scanner. Neurotechnology says it can capture all ten fingerprints in supervised or unsupervised settings. The method offers enrollment teams and remote users a way to collect prints with a camera instead of dedicated scanning hardware, the company says.
FastCAP addresses a central challenge for contactless capture: whether the resulting images can be compared with fingerprints collected on conventional equipment. Under NIST Special Publication 500-339, images captured without contact are assessed against images of the same fingers taken with an FBI-certified optical live-scan device. The assessment examines image quality, ridge orientation, corresponding fingerprint features, scale and predicted matching performance. Neurotechnology says its smartphone-based submission met the required criteria across the image pairs it submitted.
NIST concluded Phase One of FastCAP in August and published a list of vendors meeting the qualification requirements. The list establishes which submissions cleared the framework’s thresholds; it is not a ranking of their comparative accuracy or an endorsement of a product. Participating vendors include IDEMIA, Thales, Veridium and Neurotechnology. NIST developed the testing with industry participants through cooperative research agreements.
Contactless fingerprint capture is not a new addition to Neurotechnology’s portfolio. Its MegaMatcher SDK already supports smartphone-based fingerprint enrollment and search in systems used for national identity, voter registration and law enforcement. The company’s MegaMatcher ID platform combines fingerprint, face and voice biometrics for mobile and web authentication, with liveness detection among its existing features.
Neurotechnology says the version that underwent FastCAP testing will be included in upcoming releases of both products. Its existing contactless capture capability is already available, while the qualified implementation is a planned update. The company identifies digital onboarding, banking and government services as potential applications for MegaMatcher ID’s multimodal authentication tools.
Sources: Neurotechnology, NIST FastCAP, NIST SP 500-339
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
