Take a good look at libfprint. There is a list of libfprint supported devices here.  ​The reason the device could not be detected in Ubuntu or Debian is because there are no kernel devices for these scanners. So how does libfprint do it with ko modules? It uses userspace drivers (written by contributors) which work via libusb. 1:N matching is usually implemented by looping through, which is basically a 1:1 attempt at matching repeated many times.