A groundbreaking study conducted at Columbia University challenges the long-held belief that each fingerprint on a person's hand is completely unique.
According to the BBC, the research team has developed an artificial intelligence tool capable of analyzing human fingerprints to determine if they belong to the same individual.
The researchers report that the technology was able to identify, with between 75% and 90% accuracy, whether fingerprints from different fingers came from the same person. However, the exact workings of how AI achieved this remains a mystery.
Helping solve crimes
“We don't know for sure how AI does it,” said Professor Hod Lipson, a roboticist at Columbia University who supervised the study. To make sure it was correct, the team repeated the process over and over, getting the same results each time.
The researchers theory is that the tool analyzes fingerprints, which are formed at birth, in a different way than traditionally done, focusing more on the orientation of the ridges in the center of a finger than on the pattern on whose Individual ridges terminate and branch, known as minutiae.
Despite the promising results, the Columbia University team admits that more research is needed. The AI tool was trained on a large data set of 60,000 fingerprints, but a more substantial number, including partial and low-quality prints, would be needed to further refine the technology.
The findings of this study, which has been peer-reviewed and will be published in the journal Scientific advances, could significantly affect biometrics and forensic science. As the BBC reports, if an unidentified fingerprint is discovered at one crime scene and an unidentified fingerprint at another, the AI tool could potentially link the two prints to the same individual. For now, that won't be enough to solve crimes on its own, but it could help police with their investigations.
The revelation that fingerprints may not be unique to each person has not come as a surprise to everyone. Graham Williams, professor of forensic science at the University of Hull, admitted: “We don't actually know that fingerprints are unique. All we can say is that, as far as we know, no two people have yet shown the same fingerprints. fingerprints. “
