Simultaneous latent fingerprint recognition: A preliminary study

Recent cases such as Commonwealth v Patterson show that there is a lack of research in how to process and recognize simultaneous fingerprint impressions, especially when none of the latent prints in the cluster could be individually matched. SWGFAST released the first version of the standard on simultaneous impression examination that can help fingerprint examiners to systematically compare latent simultaneous impressions to a known ten-print card. However, when the individual is not known, the simultaneous fingerprint impressions have to be compared using a large database of reference ten-prints, making the process very challenging. This paper introduces the research problem of identifying simultaneous latent fingerprint impressions to the community and presents a semi-automatic approach to process the impressions of any individual. The approach generates a list of top matches and latent fingerprint examiners can then examine them for individualization. Using a fingerprint database that contains simultaneous latent impressions, we analyze the performance of the proposed approach obtained by matching simultaneous impressions with the gallery database.