Are your fingerprints really unique?

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A new AI tool says it can detect similarities in fingerprints that humans can't.

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Fingerprints have long been known to be completely unique. They also don’t change their pattern over your lifetime, making them an extremely useful biometric for identification. Their uniqueness largely comes from how they form in the womb: as waves of skin cells growing in random patterns of ridges under the top layer of skin in our hands and feet.

Fingerprints are so unique that it is considered impossible to match two different fingerprints from the same person — the only way to know for sure is to match a fingerprint to the exact finger. But a new AI tool developed by students at Columbia University says there are more similarities in intra-person, or same person, fingerprints than we’ve previously known.

Sources and further reading:

“Unveiling intra-person fingerprint similarity via deep contrastive learning,” by Gabe Guo et al.


“The developmental basis of fingerprint pattern formation and variation,” by James D. Glover et al.
(23)00045-4.pdf

One of the original studies of fingerprints, Francis Galton’s 1892 publication “Finger Prints”


"Accuracy and reliability of forensic latent fingerprint decisions," by Bradford T. Ulery et al.


Related Vox videos:

Kim's video explaining how your voice is like a fingerprint


An oldie but a goodie from Dean about the accuracy of fingerprint analysis

Joss's classic documentary on forensics, False Positive


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