There is a belief that each fingerprint on one person’s hand is completely unique but that is now being challenged by research from Columbia University.
A team at the US university trained an AI tool to examine 60,000 fingerprints to see if it could work out which ones belonged to the same individual.
The researchers claim the technology could identify, with 75-90% accuracy, whether prints from different fingers came from one person.
But they are not sure how it works.
“We don’t know for sure how the AI does it,” admitted Prof Hod Lipson, a roboticist at Columbia University who supervised the study.
The researchers think the AI tool was analysing the fingerprints in a different way to traditional methods – focusing on the orientation of the ridges in the centre of a finger rather than the way in which the individual ridges end and fork which is known as minutiae.
“It is clear that it isn’t using traditional markers that forensics have been using for decades,” said Prof Lipson. “It seems like it is using something like the curvature and the angle of the swirls in the centre.”
Prof Lipson said both he and Gabe Guo, an undergraduate student, were both surprised by the outcome.
“We were very sceptical… we had to check and double check,” he said.
That may not be news to others in the field.
Graham Williams, professor of forensic science at Hull University, said the idea of unique fingerprints had never been set in stone.
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