Introduction

Abstract

More than a century has passed since Alphonse Bertillon first conceived and then industriously practiced the idea of using body measurements for solving crimes (Rhodes, 1956). Just as his idea was gaining popularity, it faded into relative obscurity by a far more significant and practical discovery of the distinctiveness of the human fingerprints. In 1893, the Home Ministry Office, UK, accepted that no two individuals have the same fingerprints. Soon after this discovery, many major law enforcement departments saw potential of fingerprints in identifying repeat offenders who used an alias, i.e., changed their names with each arrest to evade the harshest penalties reserved for recidivists in law. The law enforcement departments embraced the idea of “booking ” the fingerprints of criminals at the time of arrest, so that their records are readily available for later identification. Fingerprints found an application in forensics. By matching leftover fingerprint smudges (latents) from crime scenes to fingerprints collected during booking, authorities could determine the identity of criminals who have been previously arrested. The law enforcement agencies sponsored a rigorous study of fingerprints, developed scientific methods for visual matching of fingerprints and instituted strong programs/ cultures for training fingerprint experts. They successfully applied the art of fingerprint recognition for nailing down the perpetrators (Scott (1951); Lee and Gaensslen (2001)). Despite the ingenious methods improvised to increase the efficiency of the manual approach to fingerprint indexing and matching, the ever growing demands on fingerprint recognition quickly became overwhelming. The manual method of fingerprint indexing (based on the Henry system of classification) resulted in a highly skewed distribution of fingerprints into bins (types): most fingerprints fell into a few bins and this did not improve the search efficiency. Fingerprint training procedures were time-intensive and slow. Furthermore, demands imposed by the painstaking attention needed to visually compare two fingerprints of varied qualities, tedium of the monotonous nature of the work, and increasing workloads due to a higher demand on fingerprint recognition services, all prompted the law enforcement agencies to initiate research into acquiring fingerprints through electronic media and automate fingerprint recognition based on the digital representation of fingerprints. These efforts led to the development of Automatic Fingerprint Identification Systems (AFIS) over the past 4 decades. Law enforcement agencies were the earliest adopters of the automatic fingerprint recognition technology. More recently, however, increasing concerns about security and identity fraud have created a growing need for fingerprint and other biometric technologies for person recognition in a large number of non-forensic applications.