Are Fingerprints Unique? Not Really, AI-Based Study Finds

An anonymous reader shares a report: 'Do you think that every fingerprint is actually unique? 'It's a question that a professor asked Gabe Guo during a casual chat while he was stuck at home during the Covid-19 lockdowns, waiting to start his freshman year at Columbia University. 'Little did I know that conversation would set the stage for the focus of my life for the next three years,' Guo said. Guo, now an undergraduate senior in Columbia's department of computer science, led a team that did a study on the subject, with the professor, Wenyao Xu of the University of Buffalo, as one of his coauthors. Published this week in the journal Science Advances, the paper seemingly upends a long-accepted truth about fingerprints: They are not, Guo and his colleagues argue, all unique.

In fact, journals rejected the work multiple times before the team appealed and eventually got it accepted at Science Advances. 'There was a lot of pushback from the forensics community initially,' recalled Guo, who had no background in forensics before the study. 'For the first iteration or two of our paper, they said it's a well-known fact that no two fingerprints are alike. I guess that really helped to improve our study, because we just kept putting more data into it, (increasing accuracy) until eventually the evidence was incontrovertible,' he said.

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