Dr. Li Wang of Britain’s University of Warwick has created Warwick Warp, a biometric system that enables the identification of distorted and partial fingerprints.  This new technology is important to biometrics because it has the potential of reducing false positives.

“In real settings, the best algorithms I’ve seen are still talking about an equal error rate of 3 to 4 percent,” said Dr. Venu Govindaraju, director of the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors at SUNY-Buffalo. “In good settings, we’re looking at 0.2 to 0.3 percent.” (The equal error rate is when the sensitivity of a test is adjusted to the point where the proportion of false-positive results equals the proportion of false-negative results.)

To put this into perspective, 3 percent is acceptable for places such as libraries and computer labs, but it is unacceptable for military bases, and various types of security, such as those in place at airports.

Most current technologies focus on what the experts call Level 1 and Level 2 features. Level 1 is the general pattern of your fingerprint (you remember: arch, loop, whorl). Level 2 includes the specifics of the way the contours end and split. The problem is that a host of environmental factors can throw noise into the data. One major noise source is that people mash their fingers onto sensors with varying amounts of pressure, generating non-linear stretching.

Because it is impossible to place your fingers on a sensor the same exact way twice, false positives have been a significant problem in using fingerprint scanners.  Warwick Warp hopes to change that by overcoming the problems of pressure, smudging, and “bent” prints.

Combined with retina and facial scans, Warwick Warp has the potential to be highly successful, especially when used in conjunction with other biometric devices.  With its uses, there will inevitably be privacy concerns over storing so much information about an individual in databases that still are unproven in protecting one’s privacy.  While the concerns are real, and potentially damaging, there’s no guarantee that these will be in wide use any time soon.