Fingerprint scanning project report published

My fprint fingerprint scanning efforts formed my final year Computer Science project at The University of Manchester. The source code for this project has been available on SourceForge from early on (GPL-2/LGPL-2 licenses). I’ve now completed and submitted a comprehensive project report (similar to a dissertation) for academic assessment, and I’m making this available under […]

Asynchronous fingerprint scanning

I’ve been a bit quiet on on the fingerprint scanning front recently, but I’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes. Adopted the libusb project libfprint has had a design flaw from early on: it only provides a synchronous interface. The technical minded will understand this better in terms that each function call […]

SFLC legal assistance for fingerprint projects

Now that NIST have finally made public information provided to me in private about their export control concerns, I wrote up a summary of the situation and approached SFLC about getting legal advice. Shortly after, I am contacted by James Vasile, a member of their counsel. James has experience in this area and I anticipate […]

Fingerprint export control news

I just noticed that the fingerprint group at NIST have dropped NFIS2 and created NBIS: NIST Biometric Image Software. NBIS is split into 2 parts: NBIS Non-Export Control: fingerprint quality analysis and feature detection tools. Source code available for download with no distribution restrictions. NBIS Export Control: fingerprint comparison utilities. Not available for download, CDROM […]

Fingerprinting legal issues update

Thanks for the responses to my plea for help up to this point. I’ve also contacted a few people who I’m waiting for responses from. I’ve been told that most of NFIS2 will become a downloadable open source project soon, which is encouraging. However, this project will NOT include the fingerprint matching algorithm, instead it […]

Fingerprint enhancement and recognition

A while ago, I posted some pretty pictures of my toe when I figured out the image format used by the Digital Persona and Microsoft fingerprint readers. While it’s pretty cool to see your fingerprint on-screen, the real question is how do we make use of these prints? We need a way of storing fingerprints, […]

More fun with fingerprints

dpfp driver and library are progressing steadily, hoping to make an initial release within the next few days. Looking for hardware hackers I’d like to thank Joaquin Custodio for donating a Digital Persona U.are.U 4000B fingerprint reader, which completes my collection of every type of product in the range! It will be interesting to finally […]

Fingerprinting

Over the last couple of days, I found the time to finish off the dpfp kernel-side driver so that it exports fingerprint data into userspace, to make it easier to investigate the image format. I had it working relatively easily. Running a small program on /dev/dpfp0 produces 7 data files, one of which is the […]

Digital Persona Fingerprint driver site launched

I’ve been receiving plenty of emails about the dpfp driver, so I set up a site and mailing list where interested people can keep track of things. I’ve also recieved a donation of two Digital Persona fingerprint scanners from Gerrie Mansur of Security Database B.V. My keyboard was originally donated by Tony Vroon from Gentoo. […]

Digital persona fingerprint driver progress

Quick update on the dpfp project: I recently upgraded to amd64, and running my existing code caused an instant kernel panic on plugin to my new system. Fixing that problem sprung the device into action – I now get the expected responses, where I was just getting silence before. Looks like my x86 was hiding […]