In recent years, counterfeiting of currency and credit cards has increased to the point where credit card fraud alone worldwide was over one billion dollars in 1996, and in the United States more than 25 billion dollars in losses to intellectual property infringement have been reported. This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project from Physical Optics Corporation will test the feasibility of a unique Optical Smart Card (OSC) biometric identification system based on correlation technique and secure fingerprint encryption. OSC technology has two critical elements: fully-random practically nonreplicable phase-only volume masks to encode and decode a reference fingerprint on an ID card; and novel advanced optical data processing to identify a live customer's fingerprint, which is invariant to rotation and plastic distortion of the finger. Scanning or replicating OSC masks is impossible because of the high optical density of the phase information and lamination, which accommodates up to 10 to the power of 30 code combinations. An additional feature of the proposed phase-encoded OSC technology is its compatibility with a variety of substrates, including thin foil and plastics for both reflection and transmission modes of operation. This OSC technology proposes to ensure a high level of security, functioning to severely curtail credit card fraud and counterfeiting. This advanced implementation of biometrics has the potential to become a valuable tool for banks, credit card firms, hospitals, government agencies, and all types of small and large businesses to accurately identify individuals, and for overall cellular phone, computer, and computer network security.
