Introduction to CFS flats

What is CFS flats?

CFS flats is IDloop’s high-quality, 3D-contactless fingerprint scanner. Using structured blue light and its Bluelynes® technology, it captures the full 3D surface of one or multiple fingers—up to eight million data points per scan at micron-scale resolution—without any surface contact. An unwrapping algorithm then converts each 3D scan into a standard 2D grayscale image, making it fully compatible with the billions of fingerprints already stored in the world’s contact-based 2D databases for both enrolment and verification.

Not all contactless scanning is created equal. Simple 2D smartphone-style photography and even more advanced “2.5D” methods struggle with scaling errors, perspective distortion, lighting dependency and polarity inversion—all of which degrade accuracy and matching. Because CFS flats scans the finger in true microscopic 3D, it eliminates all four problems at once, delivering the accuracy and reliability of contact-based capture with none of its drawbacks.

The result is a scanner that’s fast, hygienic and highly accurate—ideal for high-throughput settings like borders and airports, high-security applications in law enforcement, everyday access control, and contamination-sensitive environments such as hospitals. This white paper explains the science behind CFS flats, how it compares to other methods, and why true 3D is the future of biometric fingerprint capture.