In the second half of the 20th century, demand for more reliable and unique biometric identification facilities has grown considerably. This demand will be even stronger in the future when information technology becomes part of everyday life. More sophisticated reliable automatic biometric identification systems will then be required. Many researchers have worked for decades to create such a system based on fingerprints.

Our research centre, CWAIP, has developed a Wavelet-enhanced Automated Fingerprint Identification System, WAFIS, that has the following features.

• At a medium security level, WAFIS can identify;
  
  • low quality fingerprint images, such as images of dry fingers;
    
  • partial images of fingerprint;
    
• Robust, fast and reliable fingerprint identification
  
  The processing time, using a Pentium Pro 200 processor, of a one-to-one matching is 0.3 second, while a one-to-many search against a database of 100 fingerprints takes less than one second
  
  

Applications of WAFIS include

• Traditional law enforcement, e.g. finding the suspects from latent fingerprint;
  
• Secured transactions, e.g. using credit card for Internet banking and retailing, and for user authentication in automatic teller machines;
  
• Secured access control e.g. lift and door access in buildings, and computer or network access without using passwords or cards;
  
• Secured database system e.g. medical database of patients, nation-wide database for immigration and identification control, time-stamping database of workers in a company, and logistic database for controlling equipment checkout, or for monitoring movements of prisoners;
  
• Biometric solution for intellectual property protection for electronic commerce;
  
• Consulting service in fingerprint algorithm design/configuration for commercial clients.