Useless or used less? Poroscopy: The evidence of sweat pores

Poroscopy is the study of sweat pores present on the papillary ridges of the skin. This review paper aims to examine existing literature on poroscopy so that its relevance as a tool in personal identification can be established. Moreover, this paper aims to expound the various aspects of sweat pores as well as, highlight the contribution of poroscopy in latent, partial, and automated fingerprint matching. The relationship between sexual dimorphism, age, and sweat pores, effect of development technique and nature of surface on pore details, and use of sweat pores for liveness detection in biometric systems has also been explored. A review of all potentially relevant articles was conducted wherein, the non-relevant papers were excluded by screening their titles and abstracts following which, full-text review of all articles that met the inclusion criteria was carried out. The authors concluded that sweat pores present additional distinctive information for facilitating personal identification when used along with level 2 details. Furthermore, out of the various pore parameters namely, number, shape, size, inter-distance, position, and type, pore inter-distance was found to be most reliable.