Lumidigm Inc., received a $730,000 contract from the Army to continue development of a multimodal whole-hand sensor based on multispectral imaging technology. The award is through the Small Business Innovation Research Program. In Phase I Lumidigm developed an early prototype model and proved out its concept. In Phase II the company will deliver a whole hand sensor within 18 months. The new sensor will collect fingerprints, palmprints, skin textural characteristics and hand shape and score level multi-biometric fusion will be used to combine these four intakes to provide an overall matching score. There are several drivers behind the development of the new sensor, Matthew Ennis, Lumidigm’s vice president of business development, tells TR2. One is that for the company it becomes a research and development platform for many of its activities and also provides it with an opportunity to push the limits of the technology, he says. Second, it gives the company a chance to create “the most powerful biometric in a single sensor,” he says. The technology is also interesting to a lot of potential customers, Ennis says. In access control applications, if you have a person’s whole hand enrolled, different biometrics such as a single finger and palm print could be used to gain entry. A person not permitted to gain access to a controlled area would have to fake their entire hand to try and spoof the sensor, he says. Ennis says that conventional palmprint sensors can’t capture an entire palm because they aren’t flat whereas that’s not a problem for the multispectral imaging technology. He adds that the development effort allows Lumidigm to explore tradeoffs between high resolution, precise images and lower resolution but faster capture. The contract also allows Lumidigm to begin using data from the skin textural characteristics that multispectral imaging already collects.
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