Data-Mining for Fingerprint Identification

This video explains how fingerprinting could use an upgrade to data mining technologies. A UC Davis law professor says that the reliability of fingerprint identification has declined while the population of the world continues to grow at a fast rate. The uses of digital cameras are a great upgrade, but they capture fewer details then the old traditional cameras. He suggests the use of data mining to go through the fingerprint collections to find patterns and correlations. This would enable workers to refine the objective criteria so that the computers could better identify the prints.

Tony Doonan, a state fingerprinting specialist, believes that there are only few mistakes in accurately identifying fingerprints. Failing to match prints is not because of the camera, but because of human error when taking the prints.

While it may be human error, I believe the use of data mining could help them make matches quicker, or at least be able to narrow done suspects more accurately. This is an interesting topic. I’m not entirely sure how the system works, but I do know that sorting and analyzing billions of fingerprints could benefit from the use of data mining.