Calculating Rarity of Fingerprint

Finger prints have been used for identification ever since the 1800's. The process was lengthy and required the entire print. The reality of it is that at a crime scene, a CSO (Crime Scene Officer) may find over one hundred prints and most of them are partials. Recently, forensic scientists have come up with a way to mathematically calculate the rarity of a print.
Knowing how rare a fingerprint is can help CSO's determine which prints are helpful to the case. The software that calculates this gives a print a series of points and compares it with others. This computer then compiles the evidence and calculates rarity of the print. To date most CSO's do this calculation by hand

“They might find hundreds of prints at a crime scene, and right now the analysis is done intuitively by human examiners,” Dr. Srihari said. “But we can calculate that.”(Dr. Srihari 2010)


Newspaper or Magazine Article:
Bhanoo, Sindya. "Calculating the Rarity of a Fingerprint." The New York Times December 10, 2010: Science, online.