Albuquerque, NM - October 16, 2007 - Lumidigm Inc., the creators of multispectral imaging biometrics, announces the award of a contract to continue development of a multimodal whole-hand biometric sensor. This effort, funded through the Department of the U.S. Army's Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, builds on the results of an earlier SBIR Phase I award to Lumidigm. The Phase II contract amount is $730K.
Under the terms of the contract, Lumidigm will develop a fully-functional multi-biometric sensor based on multispectral imaging of the hand. Four distinct biometric signals will be collected for each hand insertion: fingerprints, palmprints, skin textural characteristics, and hand shape. Score-level multi-biometric fusion will be used to combine these four different biometric information sources to provide an overall matching score. Michigan State University's Anil Jain will lend his expertise in optimizing biometric performance with the fusion of multiple biometric signals.
"Lumidigm's multispectral imaging makes a whole-hand sensor technically feasible and commercially promising," said Anil Jain. "The resulting product will be one of the most secure biometric systems available."
To date, Lumidigm has focused its multispectral imaging technology on the capture of high-quality images for commercial fingerprint sensors. Capturing skin textural characteristics makes use of the additional data that multispectral imaging already collects.
"From the beginning, we understood that multispectral imaging would play a role in biometric identification and verification that extends beyond fingerprints," said Matthew Ennis, Lumidigm Vice President of Business Development. "The whole hand project represents an exciting future platform for Lumidigm."
About Anil Jain
Anil Jain is a University Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Computer Science & Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering and Statistics & Probability at Michigan State University. His research interests include statistical pattern recognition, data clustering, texture analysis, document image understanding and biometric authentication. Jain is the author of a number of books and holds six patents in the area of fingerprint matching.
About Lumidigm
Lumidigm, Inc. develops and deploys fingerprint sensors that use multispectral imaging to capture superior images quickly, on all people, in all environmental conditions. With commercial partners, venture funding, and government sponsors, Lumidigm provides liveness-protected identity management for civil identification, point-of-sale, physical and logical access, time and attendance, and portable electronic device applications. For more information, visit www.lumidigm.com.
