Are fingerprints unique? Not really, AI-based study finds

CNN reported on a study questioning the uniqueness of fingerprints that was conducted by Wenyao Xu, along researchers at Columbia University and Tufts University. Published in the journal Science Advances, the paper reveals how the research team fed an artificial intelligence model commonly used for facial recognition a U.S. government database of 60,000 fingerprints in pairs. Some belonged to the same person but from different fingers and some belonged to different people. The AI-based system found that fingerprints from different fingers of the same person shared strong similarities and was therefore able to tell when the fingerprints belonged to the same individual and when they didn’t, with an accuracy for a single pair peaking at 77% — seemingly disproving that each fingerprint is “unique.”