Idemia scanner tops contactless fingerprint biometrics in NIST accuracy, interoperability test

Idemia’s MorphoWave contactless fingerprint technology topped the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)’s latest accuracy and interoperability test on all benchmarks among touchless biometric systems, the company announced. The technology exhibited full interoperability and high accuracy similar to touch-based devices.

The “Interoperability Assessment 2019: Contactless-to-Contact Fingerprint Capture” research investigated how well touchless systems and legacy databases could work together. The study chose six contactless fingerprint scanning technologies and conventional touch-based fingerprint devices, and concluded that contactless devices for multiple finger scanning were more accurate and displayed less false positives than single finger scanners.

In the report, MorphoWave appears as Dev03. With a simple wave of a hand within the reader, the system scans and checks fingerprints in less than a second. MorphoWave topped contactless performance in matching rate, image capture sample rate, finger ridges and other areas. The NIST report confirms the technology provides efficient contactless fingerprint capture and matching against existing contact-based fingerprint database, which can be implemented for border checks and to reduce passenger queues.

“We are delighted to see contactless fingerprint capture that we pioneered is on the cusp of matching contact-based accuracy, and of course that our MorphoWave technology has emerged from this NIST interoperability test as the best in the industry,” Idemia CTO Jean-Christophe Fondeur said in a prepared statement. “Given its outstanding capacity as borne out by this NIST test, our MorphoWave Compact is a game changer and will seamlessly raise hygiene standards in a vast array of environments including corporate offices, stores, airports, theme parks and leisure and entertainment venues.”

The other systems tested included two contact fingerprint devices, one other contactless fingerprint device, and four smartphone-based technologies.

Article Topics

accuracy  |  biometric testing  |  biometrics  |  contactless biometrics  |  fingerprint readers  |  IDEMIA  |  NIST