High-resolution printed amino acid traces: a first-feature extraction approach for fingerprint forgery detection

Fingerprints are used for the identification of individuals for over a century in crime scene forensics. Here, often physical or chemical preprocessing techniques are used to render a latent fingerprint visible. For quality assurance purposes of those development techniques, Schwarz(1) introduces a technique for the reproducible generation of latent fingerprints using ink-jet printers and artificial amino acid sweat. However, this technique allows for printing latent fingerprints at crime scenes to leave false traces, too. Hence, Kiltz et al.(2) introduce a first framework for the detection of printed fingerprints. However, the utilized printers have a maximum resolution of 2400x1200 dpi. In this paper, we use a Canon PIXMA iP4600(3) printer with a much higher resolution of 9600x2400 dpi, which does not produce the kind of visible dot patterns reported in Kiltz et al.(2) We show that an acquisition with a resolution of 12700 to 25400 ppi is necessary to extract microstuctures, which perspectively allows for an automated detection of printed fingerprint traces fabricated with high-resolution printers. Using our first test set with 20 printed and 20 real, natural fingerprint patterns from the human the evaluation results indicate a very positive tendency towards the detectability of such traces using the method proposed in this paper.