Working with Biometric scanners

[Dean_Grobler]

Hey guys,

Okay, tough one. How exactly would we go about integrating Biometric scanners (e.g. fingerprint scanners) with our software?

The way I see it, the scanner scans a finger print, and then saves that data in a database, but what data is this? What file type? This is probably the main concern. Because once you have that information, you can just compare scans against the users previous scan in the database... A boolean might get returned and you can then see if the scan matches etc.

Where does one start? Any reading material anyone can suggest perhaps? I specifically want to integrate this functionality with the Java language.

Thanks in advance!

[jwenting]

the scanner should have a programming interface you can access.
Most likely it stores nothing at all, that's up to you! It just sends you data (when activated) using a specific data format that you then need to interpret in some way to figure out what's there.

[rubberman]

the scanner should have a programming interface you can access.
Most likely it stores nothing at all, that's up to you! It just sends you data (when activated) using a specific data format that you then need to interpret in some way to figure out what's there.

Indeed. You need to look at the scanner SDK/API documentation. You might be able to configure it to return an image of the print, that you then need to interpret, or you might be able to configure it to return some sort of checksum that you can compare to a database entry for the user. How you do this is very dependent upon the hardware device. If you need to support multiple devices from different manufacturers, then you need some sort of plugin architecture for you application that can load the appropriate plugin code for each supported device, yet that provides a common interface that your main program can use.