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Fingerprints are commonly held to be an infallible method of uniquely identifying an individual, but it's more an art than science: most state and federal level crime labs will not report a fingerprint match until two experts independently reach that conclusion.
Fingerprint identification (sometimes referred to as dactyloscopy) is the process of comparing questioned and known friction skin ridge impressions (see Minutiae) from fingers, palms, and toes to determine if the impressions are from the same finger (or palm, toe, etc.).
Fingerprint experts had conceded that the process they use -- matching large, evenly pressured prints taken from suspects at the police station to smaller, unevenly pressured prints from crime scenes -- is ultimately subjective and bedeviled by inconsistent standards.
A fingerprint is made of a series of ridges and furrows on the surface of the finger.
Fingerprint classification is a technique to assign a fingerprint into one of the several pre-specified types already established in the literature which can provide an indexing mechanism.
An input fingerprint is first matched at a coarse level to one of the pre-specified types and then, at a finer level, it is compared to the subset of the database containing that type of fingerprints only.
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