Can Identical Twins be Discriminated Based on Fingerprints?

Reliable and accurate identification of people is extremely important in a number of business transactions as well as access to privileged information. Automatic identification methods based on physical biometric characteristics such as fingerprint or iris can provide positive identification with a very high accuracy. However, the biometrics-based methods assume that the physical characteristics of an individual (as captured by a sensor) used for identification are distinctive. Identical twins have the closest genetics-based relationship and, therefore, the maximum similarity between fingerprints is expected to be found among identical twins. We show that a state-of-the-art automatic fingerprint identification system can successfully distinguish identical twins though with a slightly lower accuracy than nontwins.