Method for identifying a person among a population by sensing his fingerprints

A method for identifying a person among a population, by sensing the fingerprints of at least one finger of the hand of said person and comparing these fingerprints with fingerprint information from all the persons of said population previously stored in a file (1), characterized in that the shape of at least one hand of all the persons of the population is sensed previously and the hand shape information is stored in said file (1) in correlation with at least the respective fingerprint information, then in that at the time of identification of a person:

• the shape of the hand of the person is sensed (3) at the same time as the fingerprints of at least one of his/her fingers are sensed (2);
• the shape information for his/her hand is compared (5) with the hand shape information held in memory in the file (1) for the entire population;
• a group consisting of the hand shapes substantially identical to the sensed hand shape of the person to be identified is selected (6) from said file;
• and
• finally, the sensed fingerprints of the finger of the person to be identified are compared (8) with the information stored in the file in correlation with respectively the hand shapes, of only the persons of the abovesaid selected group.