The ID card - old and new.

Even though today's ID cards are equipped with many more security features compared to ID documents from 1960, they are far from being forgery-proof in the age of high-performance color copiers and printers. The race between counterfeiters and the police continues.

The latest generation ID cards are equipped with an RFID chip that stores the photo, facial shape information, fingerprint or other biometric feature. There are many different technical approaches to this, which differ significantly in both reliability and speed of recognition.

A fingerprint can be stored as a complete image or as a so-called template (i.e. only certain features of the fingerprint in the form of digital data). Depending on the technology used, there are major differences in recognition speed and recognition rate. Efficient recognition is only possible using templates; this is why this method has been used for years for access control systems.

Unfortunately, there are no international standards for templates. Consequently, in the interest of compatibility for passports or ID cards, the complete image of the fingerprint must be stored. As a consequence, a feature extraction must be performed each time a person is verified, which is time-consuming and error-prone.

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