The main concept of our system designed is presented in the figure above. A biometric sample is observed by a sensor suite comprised of various multispectral data capture devices. A set of multispectral illumination sources is synchronized with the sensors through an electronic controller board. A computer uses a Graphical User Interface (GUI) which provides the synchronization sequence through a JSON configuration file and sends capture commands that bring the controller and sensors into a capture loop leading to a sequence of synchronized multispectral frames from all devices. All captured data is then packaged into an HDF5 file and sent to a database for storage and processing. The computer also provides preview capabilities to the user by streaming data in real-time from each device while the GUI is in operation.

Our system design (both in terms of hardware and software) is governed by four key principles:

• Flexibility: Illumination sources and capture devices can be easily replaced with alternate ones with no or minimal effort both in terms of hardware and software development.
• Modularity: Whole components of the system can be disabled or removed without affecting the overall system's functionality by simply modifying the JSON configuration file.
• Legacy compatibility: The system must provide at least some type of data that can be used for biometric identification through matching with data from older sensors and biometric templates available in existing databases. 
• Complementarity: The variety of capture devices and illumination sources used aim at providing complementary information about the biometric sample aiding the underlying task at hand.