1. A method of compensating for distortion within a composite image comprising the steps of : sensing a biometric surface with a swipe imager to provide sensed data; forming a composite image from sensed data of the a biometric surface from the sensed data ; and, adjusting the composite image along a dimension thereof to one of expand or decrease the composite image size along said dimension by one of removing composite image elements along a line perpendicular to said dimension within the composite image and or adding additional image elements along a line perpendicular to said dimension within the composite image to result in a second composite image with a different number of parallel lines of composite image elements perpendicular to the dimension therein .