FB

Can you please describe how your multispectral imaging works and what the main advantages of this type of technology are?

RD

Multispectral imaging is a completely new way to obtain fingerprints from people and it uses what is conceptually a pretty simple approach. The approach is to take digital photographs of the finger. Now normally you think that that is such an obvious thing to do—let’s take some pictures of fingers and we will get the fingerprints off of them. But unfortunately, because the skin is translucent, the biometric information—the fingerprint itself—is kind of blurry in the images. The light interacts with the skin and generates a low contrast blurry image, so it is not a particularly good way to do biometrics.

We use a different approach. What we do is we use different colors of light, starting from blue, then green, and then red and we take photographs of the skin using those different colors, like colored flash photography. What happens is each of the colors penetrates the skin to a different depth. So, for example, blue light reflects almost completely off the surface of the finger, and green light penetrates a little more deeply. Different materials in the skin and the blood vessels underneath absorb different frequencies of light in different ways; so by using those different photographs and analyzing them and putting them together we obtain a highly reliable image of the fingerprint.

The reason that this works is related to the physiology of the finger itself. What you have beneath your skin is a capillary bed, and that capillary bed is a series of very small veins and arteries that are all over the tips of your fingers. They actually lie in long strands that run along the valleys of your fingerprints. These capillary beds fill with blood like a hose, and between them is collagen which was pushed up to form the ridges of your fingerprints. So this underlying capillary bed actually is what determines the pattern of your fingerprints. Now, if you are trying to obtain a fingerprint image using multispectral imaging, you can use blue light to obtain information about the surface of the skin and the surface ridges. But let’s say that the surface information, for whatever reason, is missing. Let’s say that the person has indistinct fingerprints due to work, hobbies, habits or because of some sort of skin disease or simply age. What we do is interrogate the skin using these flashes of colored light, going deeper and deeper into the skin to reveal the underlying capillary bed. Since the capillary bed gives rise to the fingerprint, we can put all those images together and produce a fingerprint image.

FB

Your sensors were just recognized as one of the 100 most technologically significant products introduced world-wide. Can you tell us about the R&D 100 Award?

RD

Yes, we were very proud to receive this award. The 2007 R&D 100 Award is awarded annually by R&D Magazine, and they have recognized the value of this technology. The awards are described as the Oscars of Invention by The Chicago Tribune. I think it is reasonably rare that a private company, especially a very small start-up company, is receiving such an award. The awards generally go to national research labs, large corporations — the IBM’s of the world. So we are very proud to be a small start-up company with 30 people to have gotten one of the top 100 most technologically significant products introduced this year. I think that really highlights the value of this technology in our industry. Biometrics is a very difficult process. The whole man-machine interface, how a machine can automatically detect a human being, identify them properly, reliably, repeatedly is a difficult task. I think we have made huge strides as a company in developing a technology that can do that better than any other fingerprint technology available in the world so far.

FB

Congratulations on that. You were also recognized as one of the fastest growing companies in New Mexico! To what do you attribute this growth?

RD

It really goes back to the basics of this technology. We introduced this technology after several years of development in which we partnered with major agencies of the United States Federal Government, including agencies such as the US Air Force, the Navy, the Army, and also the intelligence agencies such as the NSA and the CIA, to develop this technology into something that could be used in a broader market rather than just for customized analysis. This is a difficult process and we have managed to do that, and I think that is what is creating our growth. We have a deployment of our Jupiter product at a major theme park which currently processes about 200,000 people a day, over a million people a week, tens of millions of people over a year; this is an installation that is among the largest biometric installations in the world. Our technology is able to function in very difficult environments for a lot of people quickly, and it does it outdoors, in the rain, in the sun and no other fingerprint biometric has been able to reach that level of performance. We have now taken our Jupiter technology and miniaturized it into our new Venus product. The Venus platform has just been released in September. We have been introducing it to our customers and it is really taking off. I think that is the root and source of our growth.

FB

You recently announced a global biometric partner, Keico Hightech Inc. Can you tell us about this announcement?

RD

Yes! Korea is supplying the world with access control terminals and time & attendance terminals. They have taken a very strong position in this area and Keico Hightech is one of the largest terminal manufactures in Korea.

Keico has agreed to integrate our products into their access control terminals and other types of terminals and we are very excited about that. We have also announced one of the first customers to adopt one of the Keico terminals. It is a company called UK Biometrics, which has important installations throughout the United Kingdom and in Europe. This is really just the beginning for us and I think you should expect to see a lot of other announcements both with Keico and with other partners as we continue to expand and deploy our Venus product.

FB

Thank you very much Raul. I really do appreciate you taking this time!

back