honoured monasterians,

so i've been told to incorporate biometrics in the form of a fingerprint-scanner into one of my systems (basically a time-tracker) - does anyone have some experience with that? where do i start? google wasn't much help for me due to the incredible marketing-hype it has to cut through to get to the real information.

AFAIK, fingerprint-scanners usually simply scan the fingerprint (duh!), and then pass on that info as a grayscale bitmap to some program that tries to detect at least some of the "minutae" (whirls, bends, etc.), which then get passed on to some fingerprint-matching program, which tries to do a partial match on the found minutae against the stored ones.
what i'd love to have is someway to basically say something like
$user = $fingerprint_matcher->find($scan_data, $database)

[download]

in perl. if at all possible, cross-platfoem (windows and linux).
so, anyone know of where to look for something like that? security is not the primary issue, and i am well aware of all the drawbacks to a fingerprint-solution, and informed my superiors on that, but they are willing to accept that.

Update: Maybe i should rephrase my basic question to: "Does anyone know of some pre-made hardware/software package i can talk to with perl? in the worst case by parsing files?"

In reply to Biometrics with perl by schweini

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