North White Plains, New York-based Fingermatrix Inc – by stressing the North, it makes it clear that it’s not too close to IBM Corp – is celebrating the fact that the US Federal Bureau of Investigation has accepted its fingerprint digitising and matching system: the company says that it has now added a high-speed supercomputer matcher capable of making 16,000 fingerprint comparisons per second (sounds as if the company has fitted a fast maths co-processor – the term supercomputer is bandied around rather freely these days) and that a databank of 1m prints can be searched for a match in barely over one minute; the dedicated supercomputer is fed data by specialised Fingermatrix image processors and minutiae extractors especially designed to perform this one task, the immediate identification of a person even if he has changed his name and appearance; the company says that 22 US states now have its systems in.
