There are lots of physical traits that are associated with people from certain areas. Skin color, eye shape, eye color, hair color and texture. The list goes on and on.
Is there anything like this for fingerprints? Can an expert look at a fingerprint and say “The person that made this is most likely from Lithuania”?
DCnDC
August 21, 2017, 1:53pm
2
At the moment, no.maybe .
https://www.forensicmag.com/article/2015/09/can-you-determine-race-fingerprint
“The big difference is that on TV they usually find a single match, which pops up with a picture of the individual,” Michael Wieners, chief of the FBI Laboratory’s Latent Print Support Unit, complained to LiveScience.
“What the system really does is provide a list of the most likely matches,” Wieners said. “There must always be a human being who then looks at the print on the screen, side-by-side with the sample print, to determine which is really a match.”
Doing so is not a simple matter of overlaying the sample with the stored file, if only because the elasticity of skin typically means you can’t overlay the two images. The technicians must know what to look for, and knowing what to look for takes 18 months of intensive training, Wieners explained.
The other big difference is that the TV shows typically depict the operators simply inputting the fingerprint into their computer. In reality, the image must be carefully edited by the technicians to remove everything that isn’t really a fingerprint, such as dirt and digital noise. Failing to do so will reduce the accuracy of the process by about 30 percent, he warned.
And while the TV shows typically depict instantaneous results, running a print through the FBI’s database of 53 million files (called the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or IAEFS) takes close to two hours, he added.
Cool. Thanks for those links