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Different Types of Sensors and Their Applications

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Capacitive Sensors
Capacitive sensors use an array capacitor plates to image the fingerprint. Skin is conductive enough to provide a capacitive coupling with an individual capacitive element on the array. Ridges, being closer to the detector, have a higher capacitance and valleys have a lower capacitance. Some capacitive sensors apply a small voltage to the finger to enhance the signal and create better image contrast.

Capacitive sensors can be sensitive to electrostatic discharge (shock) but they are insensitive to ambient lighting and are more resist contamination issues than some optical designs.

Optical Sensors
Optical sensors use arrays of photodiode or phototransistor detectors to convert the energy in light incident on the detector into electrical charge. The sensor package usually includes a light-emitting-diode (LED) to illuminate the finger.

There are two detector types used by optical sensors, charge-coupled-devices (CCD) and CMOS based optical imagers. CCD detectors are sensitive to low light levels and are capable of making excellent grayscale pictures. However, CCD fabrication is relatively expensive and neither low-light sensitivity or grayscale imaging are required for fingerprint recognition. CMOS optical imagers are manufactured in quantity and can be made with some of the image processing steps built into the chip resulting in a lower cost.

Optical sensors for fingerprints may be affected by a number of real world factors such as stray light and

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