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Jan 10, 2024

AI discovers that not every fingerprint is unique

Posted by in categories: government, robotics/AI

It’s a well-accepted fact in the forensics community that fingerprints of different fingers of the same person— intra-person fingerprints—are unique and, therefore, unmatchable.

A team led by Columbia Engineering undergraduate senior Gabe Guo challenged this widely held presumption. Guo, who had no prior knowledge of forensics, found a public U.S. government database of some 60,000 fingerprints and fed them in pairs into an artificial intelligence-based system known as a deep contrastive network. Sometimes the pairs belonged to the same person (but different fingers), and sometimes they belonged to different people.

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