CLPEX Chat Board

Can anyone refer me to any studies that give statistics on how often latent prints are finger prints and how often they are palm prints? Are there any studies that break down latent palm prints into the percentages of interdigital, thenar, and hypothenear?

My agency doesn’t have an APIS system. If an agency does have one, can you gather stats on the percentages of prints entered from different areas of the palm and which areas have a higher hit rate?

Thanks,
michele.triplett@kingcounty.gov

Anil Jain cites the following statistic in a paper from May 2008 :http://www.cse.msu.edu/biometrics/Publi ... hing08.pdf:

25% of all crime scenes contain only latent palmprints [1] and 30% of the latents recovered from crime scenes are of palms [2].

His sources are [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/21/nyreg ... -clue.html
and [2] an article from businesswire.com, which I can't find online, but the same stat is quoted here:(scroll down to Palmprint Recognition) http://vvv.dss.state.ct.us/digital/news28/bhsug28.htm

The sources of those two statistics come from 1) the NYPD Central records division and 2) Sagem Morpho. Keep in mind though that these sources represent statistics from approximately 5 - 6 years ago and may or may not have changed with the introduction of more APIS systems. Unfortunately they don't break out the palmar source. Hey, it's a start though!

Our Motorola system does latent palms but I have yet, after two years of use, to have a hit with it yet. The database is just too small at the moment. Test cases certainly hit and the day will come when there will be an actual forward hit and reverse. We have many agencies yet that do not collect palms, it is a slow but sure process. I'll check it to see if one of the admin functions allows for palm region break down.

Hi Michele,

I have a Cogent AFIS with palms and I love it. I don't have the exact stats you were requesting, but I can tell you that MCSO went on-line with the Cogent LiveScan directly uploading fingerprints and palm prints on January 2, 2006. I got my first latent fingerprint hit on January 17, 2006. That was luck as there were only about 1700 people in the database at the time and this guy was one of our more active customers in committing crimes and getting arrested.

I got my first palm print hit on September 1, 2006. Since then, I have gotten 33 more hits on palm prints, the most recent one was yesterday. In 13 cases, all we had were palm prints, so if I didn't have this system, chances are we would never had identified them.

As to section of the palm that get hits, I would estimate 65% are hypothenars and 35% are interdigitals. I may have gotten one hit on a thenar, but I don't recall it if I did.

Kathy