The Office of the Director of National Intelligence wants cybersecurity experts to offer assistance in development of a completely automated fingerprint authentication service.The DNI's Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, has launched a new “Nail to Nail (N2N) Fingerprint Challenge,” with the aim of improving live and forensic biometric fingerprint recognition until human operators are no longer needed.IARPA explained in a statement that N2N fingerprints capture the entire fingerprint from the edge of one finger nail bed to the other.The existing N2N standard utilizes a trained human operator who holds and physically 'rolls' the subject's fingerprints over a surface in order to capture the complete print. However, they only capture the parts of the finger touching the sensor, providing significantly less surface area and decreased matching performance for live and latent fingerprint recognition.With this challenge, IARPA seeks to produce an automated N2N capture technology that can eliminate the need for human operators while collecting data that performs as good as or better than the traditional rolled biometric gold standard for matching other live collection or forensic fingerprints.The Challenge will officially run in two stages through the fall of 2017 and conclude in a final live test where finalists will be invited to test out their devices in the Washington DC metro area. Their captures will then be compared to ground truth data and finalists will be eligible to win prizes from a total prize purse of $325,000.
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