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Fast & easy proof-positive identification The Fingerscan Personal ID System Fujitsu Australia has announced a marketing agreement with Bio Recognition Systems for the Fingerscan personal identi­fication system which was designed & developed in Australia. Fujitsu will market the system world-wide. By LEO SIMPSON Many readers will recall our report on the Fingerscan system which was featured in the May 1990 issue of SILICON CHIP. It has now been refined and repackaged and the software rewritten for Windows applications. The Fingerscan system has wide applica­tion in small or large businesses, anywhere where personal secur­ity is required, whether it is for entry into a carpark or build­ing, or for access to a computer system or to a restricted area. For those who are not familiar with the Fingerscan system, we shall provide an updated description. Finger­ scan is an elec­tronic finger scanning device which records and stores your finger image in computer memory. The photos accompanying this article show it used in two applications, one for access to a computer instead of the normal password system and the other, Fujitsu’s immediate application as a time and attendance clock for retail stores and factories. As shown in the photos, with both units you just place your finger over a small plastic window. The unit then scans your finger and shortly after you are either identified or asked to try again. According to the developers, Bio Recognition Systems, the Finger­ scan “is based on digital holography and involves an electro-optical scanner about the size of a thumb print which reads three-dimensional data from the finger such as skin undula­ Originally used in our May 1990 issue, this tions, ridges and valleys, photo shows Finger­scan being used instead of reflections and other living the more traditional password to control access charac­teristics. to a computer system. It makes unauthorised “One of the living characaccess virtually impossible. 8  Silicon Chip teristics is the blood flow pat­tern within the finger. Building on these various three-dimen­ s ional data, a unique personal pattern is built up. This pattern is not a fingerprint and does not rely on print data. A fingerprint is a two-dimensional pattern which relies upon certain key minutiae to identify one print from another. The heart of the system is a CCD (charge coupled camera) which takes three scans of the finger. For each separate scan, the finger is lit by different coloured LEDs: red for the first, orange for the second and green for the third. Each of the LEDs illuminates the finger from a slightly different angle so that the image detail recorded by the CCD camera is not the same. The analog picture information from the CCD camera is converted into digital data and processed in a module which employs a 68000 microprocessor and a large custom gate array. The data is compressed and stored as a 1242 byte template file. By comparison, a finger image file takes up about 150 kilobytes. A template file can only be compared with a newly presented finger image to provide identification. This has three results which are important for privacy implications: (1) a finger image cannot be recreated from a template file; (2) A template cannot be compared with any other template and therefore the system can only be used with the cooperation of users who must put their live finger on the scanner in order to be matched with a stored template; and (3) A person has a choice of 10 fingers to use, none of which is the same. Therefore, a person could use a different finger for dif­ferent applications where Fingerscan was in use. This is the new version of Fingerscan, developed in Australia as a Time & Attendance clock for Fujitsu. It uses a CCD camera to create and store a 3-dimensional record of a person’s finger. For example, a person could use the index finger for time and attendance at their place of work, the left thumb for a bank account and the ring finger for computer access. A person is therefore recognis­ able only within a closed system and only if they so choose. Users are enrolled in a Fingerscan system in about 25 sec­ onds. Each subsequent positive identifications takes less than half a second. The false acceptance rate is claimed to be .0001% (ie, one in a million), while the false rejection rate is less than 1%. The Fingerscan unit comes in various memory sizes. The base model has 512Kb of memory which can be increased up to 2Mb, allowing for storage of up to 1200 finger records as well as a transaction log. The unit can also retrieve finger records when networked from a remote PC or other host computer. There is therefore no real limit to the number of users that can be regis­tered on a system. The keyboard has 16 keys which includes six function keys that can be programmed to suit the application. The readout is a backlit 2-line by 16character alphanumeric display. Fingerscan comes with a variety of interfaces. It has four TTL alarm inputs and four TTL outputs, RS232 or RS485 serial outputs and an optional smart card interface. It can also operate a doorlock using the built-in doorlock relay driver. Mr John Parselle, managing director of Bio Recognition Systems, made the following comments on the agreement with Fujit­su: “Our new design came about because we had a major client with an offshore subsidiary who required a much more responsive bio­ metric device than our existing model. We successfully applied for a Federal Government Discretionary Grant to redesign Finger­scan to meet this export opportunity. The initial order is for 250 units but we have great expectations of increasing this to several thousand in the short term. We subsequently designed the second Finger­scan unit specifically as a Time and Attendance clock for Fujitsu Australia and signed the marketing agreement with Fujitsu Australia to jointly market both new Fingerscan products. For further information on the Fingerscan ID system contact Fujitsu Aust­ralia Ltd, 376 Lane Cove Road, North Ryde, NSW 2113. Phone (02) SC 887 9222. May 1994  9