FBI fingerprint background check for employment and Solutions of poor quality fingerprints

The performance of biometric systems does not depend on the quality of the acquired input samples, the quality can be improved, either by sensor design, by user interface design, or by standards compliance, The best fingerprint scanners are expensive & might not fall in the budget, then you can use high-end fingerprint scanners for registration and low-end fingerprint scanners for matching.

FBI fingerprint

The quality of Fingerprint can be determined by many factors, some of which are beyond your control, but others which you can influence before being fingerprinted, Some factors you can’t control that affect skin health and dryness include age, medications you’re taking, acute hydrosis or sweating, and genetics.

Some factors you can control such as hydration (drinking water) and the application of oil-free lotion to your fingertips starting a day or two before your appointment, you should not use hand sanitizer or wash your hands immediately prior to your fingerprinting appointment, Dryness or excess moisture (sweat) & heat are the biggest challenges to obtain good fingerprints, so it is recommended to come to your appointment with cool and dry, but hydrated hands.

Solutions for poor-quality fingerprints

You should not drink lots of water starting the day before your fingerprinting appointment and minimize caffeine and alcohol, You should apply oil-free moisturizing lotion to your hands a couple of times the day before the appointment & again the morning of the appointment, especially each time after you wash your hands.

You should not swim or have your hands in water (especially salt water) before the fingerprinting appointment, You should not wash your hands or use hand sanitizer immediately before your fingerprinting appointment, you have to cool your hands before coming in for your fingerprinting appointment, especially on hot humid days.

Ways to Improve Fingerprint Enrollment Process

You should improve the Fingerprint Enrollment process as it is the most critical process in any fingerprint software, All future matching will happen against enrolled fingerprints, So, the enrollment template should be of high quality, Many biometric projects fail because the users are not identified correctly during daily use.

You should use the best available fingerprint reader, Selecting the right fingerprint reader is a very important step, If the biometric scanner that you are using for registration can’t take the best images, so, the whole system will fail as you will end up registering bad quality fingerprints, Your biometric database will contain substandard fingerprints.

You should train users to place the finger correctly on the fingerprint scanner, the finger must be placed directly on the finger scanning area of the fingerprint sensor to get the best fingerprint images, the tip of the finger is at the top of the finger sensing area and the finger is centered from left to right.

You should capture only the best fingerprints and discard not so good ones, You have to incorporate a fingerprint quality check in your fingerprint capture process, Ensure that you only use the best quality fingerprints to create the fingerprint template, You can discard fingerprint images that are not so good, This might increase your registration time by a few seconds but it is worth it and will save a tremendous amount of time to users during day to day use.

You should capture multiple fingerprints, Capturing multiple fingerprints ensures that there is a backup in case of injury, Also, if the user is having trouble being identified via his index finger, he can use an alternate finger, You have to use Rolled fingerprints that can capture more minutiae & larger fingerprint area ensuring which template has lots of fingerprint data points, You can consider using rolled fingerprints for registration.

Every Fingerprint software has a pre-defined fingerprint matching threshold, It is highly unlikely that 2 fingerprint minutiae templates acquired from the same finger at different sessions will be 100% exact match, so, during fingerprint matching, the fingerprint software compares 2 fingerprint templates and returns a match score, when the match score is higher than the predefined match threshold, the input template has successfully matched with the stored template.

When the match threshold is set too high, you will have high False Rejections, when the match threshold is too low, so, we will have high False Acceptance, You can adjust the fingerprint matching threshold based on your application,  Biometric Attendance Software does not require the same threshold as Biometric Banking Software.

Tips to get the highest quality fingerprints

You have to use the display number to judge the print, When you enroll your fingerprints, you can use the number on the screen display as an indicator of how good the print is, Fingercheck biometric time clocks max out at 100 but any number above an 80 is good, You should try the left & the right hand, you can see which hand the machine prefers, Sometimes there is a difference between both hands’ prints.

You should enroll more than one finger so that you have a backup finger if your employee gets a cut, It gives your employees more tools to clock in & out with, you have to clean the sensor, you must set up one-to-one punching, Identify yourself to your machine before clocking in and out can reduce the verification time by 50%.

You have to reduce your clock’s sensitivity, If your biometric time clock has a difficult time verifying your employees’ prints because your clock’s sensitivity is high, you should be in the window that allows you to change your clock’s sensitivity, change your finger sensitivity to low, and then save.

How do I deal with poor fingerprint quality?

If you have poor fingerprint quality during both registration and identification, You can reduce identification error rates, You should check fingerprint quality during registration, Use IEngine_GetFingerprintQuality in C++ or Fingerprint Quality in .NET, Fingerprint quality rating above 40 is good enough for most purposes, If fingerprint scanned during registration has quality below 40, scan it again.

You have to scan multiple views of the same finger during registration and match every view against all other views of the same finger, If any two don’t match, repeat registration, It is possible to reduce the error rate by registering multiple fingers, Users can then identify using any one of the registered fingers.

You should capture multiple images of the same finger during the registration of fingerprints, and capture multiple images of the same finger to create a consolidated fingerprint template, More fingerprint samples mean the fingerprint scanner software or fingerprint algorithm has more minutiae points to create a superb fingerprint template.

You have to ensure that when you are capturing multiple images of the same finger, the user lifts his finger and places it again on the scanner between each capture, The benefit of capturing multiple images of the same finger is eliminated when the finger is not lifted between each capture.

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