Neurotechnology’s contactless fingerprint technology clears NIST FastCAP milestone

VILNIUS, Lithuania—Neurotechnology announced that its contactless fingerprint capture technology has successfully completed qualification testing under the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST’s) Fast Capture (FastCAP) program. 

According to the company, the technology met the requirements of NIST Special Publication 500-339, which establishes certification testing standards for contactless fingerprint acquisition devices. The qualification means fingerprints captured with a standard smartphone camera can be matched against existing contact-based fingerprint records, a key requirement for many identity management applications.

Neurotechnology said the technology enables any smartphone camera to capture all 10 fingerprints in either supervised or unsupervised environments.

“Contactless fingerprint capture becomes much more useful when the images it produces can be searched against existing contact-based records,” said Evaldas Borcovas, head of biometrics research at Neurotechnology. “The NIST qualification confirms that fingerprints captured with our technology on an ordinary smartphone camera are interoperable with contact-collected data, which is the requirement for using them in real identity systems.”

The FastCAP program is administered by NIST’s Biometric Technologies Group in cooperation with industry partners. During the program’s first phase, participating technologies were evaluated for biometric acquisition performance and rapid contactless tenprint capture capabilities.

Under the SP 500-339 testing process, contactless fingerprint images are compared against images of the same fingers collected using an FBI-certified optical live-scan device. The images are assessed using NIST’s Fingerprint Registration and Comparison Tool, which measures factors including image quality, ridge orientation, corresponding minutiae and scale accuracy.

Neurotechnology said its smartphone-based contactless capture technology met the required performance thresholds across all submitted image pairs.

The company has offered contactless fingerprint capture technology for several years through its MegaMatcher product portfolio. The technology is used in applications ranging from national ID and voter registration programs to law enforcement, banking, digital onboarding, payments and government e-services.

Neurotechnology said the NIST-qualified version of the technology will be included in upcoming releases of MegaMatcher SDK and MegaMatcher ID.