Carbon Dot and Cyanoacrylate Fuming Method for Latent Fingerprint Detection

Overview

From helping solve murder cases to low level crimes, fingerprints are an invaluable forensic tool. Traditional fingerprinting methods using fluorescent dye staining are valuable to enhance fingerprint imaging, but can be expensive, difficult to synthesize, and aren’t environmentally friendly. Improving the current methods of fingerprint detection is important to help increase the validity of fingerprints in trial and expedite the hearing process. This project sought to create a new method of fingerprint analysis using carbon dots, a relatively new carbon nanomaterial, and cyanoacrylate fuming, a traditional method of fingerprinting, to produce higher quality fluorescent prints. Three trials were done to gather the fingerprints. One group consisted of fingerprints that underwent cyanoacrylate fuming treated with a fluorescent (CyanoBlue) spray. The second control group was only dusted with a carbon dot powder. The novel method, or experimental group was dusted with a carbon dot powder then further processed using cyanoacrylate fuming. The carbon dot prints were viewed under 625nm, 530nm, and 465nm alternate light sources, while control group 1 was viewed under 365nm. The prints were analyzed using the FpMV (Fingerprint Minutiae Viewer BETA 3.0) program which gave the number of visible minutiae and NFIQ (fingerprint image quality) score of each print. The number of minutiae were used to compare the quality of the fingerprints. The difference between the cyanoacrylate and novel prints were statistically significant (p<0.0026) under a two tailed T-test assuming unequal variances with the experimental prints producing ~52 more visible minutiae on average. The difference between the experimental prints and the control group 2 prints wasn’t statistically significant, however, there were still ~13 more visible minutiae on average, which is noteworthy as forensic scientists look for at least 8-12 matching minutiae.

Competition history

• AJAS 2024 Category not listed

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