Pilot study demonstrates effectiveness of electronic devices in capturing fingerprints from deceased individuals, suggesting innovative forensic methods.
This paper presents a pilot study on the feasibility of using a selected commercial electronic fingerprint biometric capture subsystem for post mortem biometric recognition. The study investigates the effectiveness of contact and contactless devices in capturing fingerprints from deceased individuals within 48 hours after death. The environmental conditions, legal and medical implications, and post mortem changes that affect skin integrity are examined. Fingerprint quality and interoperability were evaluated using the NFIQ 2 and IDkit tools. The results show that while traditional dactyloscopic cards offer lower image quality for algorithmic comparison, some modern digital devices provide promising results for post mortem fingerprint acquisition and comparison.
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Zhang et al. (2025) studied this question.
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