Full fingerprint scanner using optical coherence tomography

In recent years, several advances in fingerprint scanning technology regarding cost efficiency, quality&performance and presentation attack detection (PAD) helped to establish fingerprint biometry in more and more areas of application for mainstream as well as high security/governmental purposes. However, there are still cases where the current state of the art is struggling with the technological limitations. Worn out fingers, and even more fingers of infants, are very problematic to scan in sufficient quality. But even more important, in the field of unsupervised high security applications, is the fact that even those devices with the best available PAD protection can still be fooled with cheap artefacts - despite their current high complexity and increasing difficulty of improvements. On the lookout for technological alternatives, the optical coherence tomography (OCT) came into our focus. The OCT is able to look underneath the skin and acquire high resolution 3D images up to a depth of 2mm. First feasibility studies have shown a very high potential for solving the mentioned issues (and more) but have been conducted with existing medical OCT devices, which were, in many aspects, not suitable for for the time- cost- and mobility requirements of real world applications. For this reason, the goal for our current project ”OCT-II” is to develop state-of-the-art OCT prototypes solely dedicated for high quality fingerprint acquisition and reliable PAD, with the focus on real world constrains regarding scanning area size, high speed data acquisition & data processing, cost and mobility. This paper will present and discuss the challenges and concepts of this project.