Integrated Biometrics Partners With Sciometrics to Develop Contactless Fingerprint Technology

Integrated Biometrics (IB) has entered into a strategic partnership with Sciometrics. Moving forward, the two companies will be working together to advance the development of contactless fingerprint biometrics on mobile devices.

The goal is to make contactless fingerprint authentication interoperable with more traditional touch-based databases. In plain terms, that means that Sciometrics and IB would be able to match a fingerprint captured with a high-resolution smartphone camera to a print that was captured with a legacy touch scanner.

The joint solution will draw on Sciometrics’ Slapshot API in addition to IB’s expertise with fingerprint scanners. The Slapshot API allows people to take a photo of their finger with a smartphone camera to capture a print. IB’s physical scanners, meanwhile, are FBI-certified, and have been deployed for border control and relief efforts, amongst other applications.

IB will be marketing Slapshot through the new arrangement, and indicated that the development partnership will eventually lead to the release of new contactless solutions. The two companies are also hoping that their work will inform the creation of new NIST and FBI standards for contactless scanners that need to work with legacy systems.

“IB sees contactless fingerprint identity as an emerging and exciting modality,” said IB CEO Steve Thies. “We believe our collaboration will provide our customers globally the ability to expand their identity capabilities using their fleets of smartphones.”

“This strategic development agreement speaks to IB’s commitment to add the best contactless identity to their portfolio, and to supporting their customers with legacy contact databases as the technology advances,” added Sciometrics President Mark Walch.

Sciometrics has been working with the NIST to develop contactless matching standards since 2016. For its part, IB argued that a contactless smartphone solution would make it easier for customers to identify people while in the field, since they would no longer need to carry a dedicated capture device. Until then, IB has tried to make its scanners safer through the use of an antimicrobial coating from NBD Nanotechnologies.

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July 9, 2021 – by Eric Weiss