The real world is a rough place, and most of us are showing some wear and tear on our hands. Additionally, people don’t have time to wash and lotion their hands when they use a fingerprint sensor, and they resent the inconvenience. Multispectral imaging sensors from Lumidigm take you as you are — at the office, auto shop, or construction site.

A construction site is an interesting real world case. Construction workers work with their hands and have the cuts and calluses to prove it. Additionally, the construction site is dirty so workers may have grime on their hands when they approach a fingerprint sensor. Altogether, this real world scenario is a nightmare for system administrators whose conventional fingerprint sensors depend on quality contact between the finger and the platen.

Images of a construction worker’s fingerprint, collected with two different sensor technologies

Lumidigm’s multispectral fingerprint sensors work well in situations such as these for two important reasons. First, they are able to gather fingerprint information from beneath the surface of the skin. It is not a problem if the fingerprint ridges on the surface are marred by an injury or a callous because the subsurface information remains intact, and Lumidigm sensors can collect it. Second, Lumidigm sensors do not require perfect finger/sensor contact. If a user’s finger is dirty — an occupational hazard of a construction worker — the debris will prevent good clean contact between the finger and the sensor. This is a huge problem for a conventional optical sensor, but no problem at all for a multispectral imaging sensor.