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The Real World is Dry Dry fingers! Has any other real world condition caused so much trouble in the biometrics industry? Dry fingertips are common, caused by anything from climate conditions and natural skin characteristics to frequent hand-washing. And yet it is very difficult for conventional technologies to capture fingerprint images from dry fingers.

It’s hard to appreciate Easy Clocking’s solution without first understanding why conventional technologies have so much trouble with dry fingers. Most optical sensors are configured to look for the presence or absence of total internal reflectance (TIR), which is the phenomenon whereby the interface between glass and air acts like a mirror at certain angles. The contact between the skin and the platen defeats the TIR, allowing those points of contact between the finger and the sensor to be imaged. Thus, those points of contact must be complete and unobscured to enable the conventional sensor to collect a fingerprint image. And with dry fingers, this is simply not the case! Establishing firm and complete contact with the sensor is very difficult with dry fingers. There is not enough moisture in the skin nor is the skin pliable enough to facilitate the contact necessary for TIR imaging.

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Easy Clocking fingerprint sensors do not require perfect contact between the finger and the platen because they use multispectral imaging, a direct imaging technology. Rather than capturing information about the finger/ sensor contact and creating an image from that, the Easy Clocking sensor effectively takes a snapshot of the fingertip. It is in this way that we sidestep the problem of dry fingers in the real world.