Depth‐Resolved Poroscopy: A Swept‐Source Optical Coherence Tomography Approach to Automated Fingerprint Microfeature Analysis

We demonstrate a depth-resolved Swept-Source Optical Coherence Tomography (SS-OCT) system for automated poroscopy network identification in fingerprint biometrics. The system employs a 100 kHz swept-source laser (λ₀ = 1060 nm, Δλ = 110 nm) to achieve ~4.5 μm axial and 13 μm lateral resolution at 1.8 mW incident power. High-density scanning (1500 A-scans/B-scan × 500 B-scans over a 3 × 3 mm region) captures volumetric en face images that precisely localize Level 3 sweat-pore microfeatures. In a study of 40 healthy volunteers (20 M, 20 F), an automated ImageJ pipeline extracted pore morphology with sub-pixel accuracy. Two-way ANOVA attributed 60.10% of total variance to pore shape (p < 0.0001) and 14.62% to gender (p < 0.0001). The average pore count was significantly higher in males (20.53 ± 2.14) compared to females (14.00 ± 1.76, p < 0.0001). These results validate SS-OCT-based poroscopy as a robust, depth-resolved alternative for forensic and biometric identification.