A fork of libfrpint with ElanTech fingerprint reader driver

Original libfprint readme is in README

Supported readers

04f3: 0903, 0907, 0c01-0c33

Trying it out

git clone git@github.com:iafilatov/libfprint.git
cd libfprint
./autogen.sh
make

Capture

This may require root

examples/img_capture

Then open finger.pgm with an image viewer.

Try enrolling and verifying

examples/enroll
examples/verify

Last enrolled image is stored in enrolled.pgm, last one used for verification is verify.pgm.

Try with fprint_demo

Install fprint_demo.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./libfprint/.libs/ fprint_demo

Installing

Running ./configure disables debug logging which you probably don't want all over your system logs.

./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

Now you can use it with fprintd. Don't forget to enroll: fprintd-enroll.

frpintd-enroll and fprintd-verify are separate from examples/enroll and examples/verify.

Common problems

The algorithm which libfprint uses to match fingerprints doesn't like small images like the ones these drivers produce. There's just not enough minutiae (recognizable print-specific points) on them for a reliable match. This means that unless another matching algo is found/implemented, these readers will not work as good with libfprint as they do with vendor drivers.

To get bigger images the driver expects you to swipe the finger over the reader. This works quite well for readers with a rectangular 144x64 sensor. Worse than real swipe readers but good enough for day-to-day use. It needs a steady and relatively slow swipe. There are also square 96x96 sensors and I don't know whether they are in fact usable or not because I don't have one. I imagine they'd be less reliable because the resulting image is even smaller. If they can't be made usable with libfprint, I might end up dropping them because it's better than saying they work when they don't.

Most enrolling and verification problems are caused by bad quality of scans. Check various *.pgm files to see what's wrong.

Good image

Touch instead of swipe

Part of log from example/enroll:

...
assembling:debug [do_movement_estimation] calc delta completed in 0.151993 secs
assembling:debug [do_movement_estimation] calc delta completed in 0.145175 secs
assembling:debug [fpi_do_movement_estimation] errors: 164713 rev: 163875
assembling:debug [fpi_assemble_frames] height is -20              <-- height too small (abs value)
fp:debug [fpi_img_new] length=15120
fp:debug [fpi_imgdev_image_captured]
fp:debug [fpi_img_detect_minutiae] minutiae scan completed in 0.003507 secs
fp:debug [fpi_img_detect_minutiae] detected 4 minutiae
fp:debug [print_data_new] driver=15 devtype=0000
fp:debug [fpi_imgdev_image_captured] not enough minutiae, 4/10    <-- can't get enough minutiae
...
sync:debug [fp_enroll_finger_img] enroll should retry
fp:debug [fp_img_save_to_file] written to 'enrolled.pgm'
Wrote scanned image to enrolled.pgm
Didn't quite catch that. Please try again.

Finger moved too fast

If you swipe too fast, frames don't cover the fingerprint without gaps. Try swiping along the entire fingerprint in no less than 2 sec.

Rotated reader

Some readers have square sensors and since they are in fact touch type, there's no difference how they are installed in relation to the user. The driver assumes a certain orientation but since in can't know for sure, sometimes the orientation is wrong and the the frames are assembled incorrectly.

Since in theory the same reader can be installed differently, there's no good way to deal with this problem at the moment. If you have it, please open an issue and include your device id and short description (e.g laptop model if the reader is integrated or model if it's a separate USB device).

DoZh / libfprint