Revolution in forensic medicine: it is discovered that a person can have the same fingerprints
Revolution in forensic medicine. Engineers of the American universities of Columbia and Buffalo, in the United States, have created a new analysis of the fingerprint through artificial intelligence (AI) that throw down the long-held belief in forensic medicine that no two fingerprints are ever alike, not even on different fingers of the same person. Well yes, it is possible.
The discovery, which was published last week in the Science Advance magazine has demonstrated with a 99.99% confidence that fingerprints from any two fingers of the same person are much more similar than previously thought.
Fingerprints are essential in laboratories criminology to solve cases, and on billions of mobile phones around the world for digital authentication.
Now, the study led by Gabe Guo, an engineering student at Columbia, together with other researchers from the same university and from Buffalo, has shown that it is possible to overcome this limitation by analyzing different characteristics of traces that until now were not taken into account.
The students found a US government public database with about 60,000 fingerprints, some from the same person and others from different people.
They extracted representation vectors from the footprints and they observed some surprising results: fingerprints from different fingers of the same person are extremely similar.
They discovered that the key was in the ridges (the most prominent area of the fingerprint), since its orientation near the center of the fingerprints explained much of this similarity and that the pattern was repeated in all pairs of fingers of the same person.