Spotlight: A Closer Look at the Fingerprint Landscape

When you think of fingerprints, you probably picture a 2D black-and-white image. In reality, fingerprints are a two-dimensional representation of a very three-dimensional object.

NIST’s work on contactless fingerprint capture standards and tools prompted researchers to step back and take another look at fingerprints — specifically, the way they look before making a 2D impression of them.

This image shows one of the test fingerprint ridge patterns that NIST researchers studied while working on contactless calibration targets. Each of the beautiful, majestic rolling hills below is only about 300 to 400 micrometers wide, and all of them together are what makes up your fingerprints.

This might be what they mean by “making mountains out of molehills.”