Veridium Advocates for Use of NIST-approved Contactless Fingerprint Technologies

Veridium is encouraging more organizations to embrace contactless fingerprint technologies, especially now that the NIST has laid out comprehensive guidelines for those interested in doing so. Those guidelines debuted in March of this year, with the release of NIST Special Publication 500-334.

For its part, Veridium worked with the NIST (and other industry players) to create those standards, and to develop and test contactless fingerprint solutions that can meet them. The company built its own 4 Fingers product to meet those NIST guidelines.

The actual Special Publication, meanwhile, applies to systems that use a device camera to capture an image of a person’s fingerprint. Such systems can use the cameras that appear in common mobile devices, including those that run on the Android or iOS platforms. In practice, those cameras can be used to capture an image of a person’s fingerprint, and that image can be matched to a print that was captured through more traditional methods.

The upshot is that the contactless fingerprinting method is interoperable with legacy solutions, which means that government agencies can still take advantage of the databases that they have built over the course of several decades (users do not need to place their finger on a screen or camera when using the 4 Fingers solution). At the same time, the technology also eliminates the need for dedicated (and contact-based) fingerprint capture devices, since consumers will be able to use their own personal devices for fingerprint identification.

In doing so, it makes fingerprinting more accessible, and allows other organizations to use contactless prints for remote identity verification. The NIST guidelines cover the end-to-end capture, storage, and transmission of contactless fingerprints, with Veridium noting that the technology improves privacy because much of the matching process is carried out on-device and prints no longer need to go through a series of intermediaries.

“The new standards open many new doors as many countries around the globe require fingerprints for access to social services from remote and underserved areas,” said Veridium CTO John Callahan. “Contactless acquisition makes this possible with the use of existing mobile services, without requiring specialized hardware.”

4 Fingers has liveness detection to guard against fingerprint spoofing. Veridium recently formed a strategic partnership with Jumio, and it has rounded out its portfolio with face and behavioral biometrics technology. 

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September 2, 2021 – by Eric Weiss