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Math Tool Helps FBI StoreThe FBI has a database of 200 million fingerprint records stored in the form of inked impressions on paper cards. With 30,000 new cards a day coming in from all over the country, the Bureau faced a serious data storage and retrieval problem. In '' Fingerprints Go Digital, '' an article in the November 1995 issue of Notices of the AMS, Christopher M. Brislawn describes the mathematics behind a state-of-the-art solution developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory.The solution uses a mathematical tool called wavelets. Like the Fast Fourier Transform, which has been used by scientists and engineers for many years now, wavelets provide a means of representing and organizing complicated data by breaking it into smaller, more tractable mathematical components. For example, such tools have been used to break human speech into its harmonic components, thereby helping to create computers that can imitate and recognize human speech. In addition to representing information in simpler component parts, wavelets have the capability to ``zoom in'' on particularly complicated portions of the data. For this reason, wavelets are especially suited to the compression of images for computer storage, making them a natural choice for the solution of the FBI's fingerprint problem.
-Allyn Jackson
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