Born on July 20, 1858 on the island of Hvar, originally from Montenegro, Ivan Vucetic settled in Argentina in 1882, when he was 23 years old. After receiving Argentine citizenship, he changed his name to Juan Vucetic. In 1888, he joined the Central Police Department of the Province of Buenos Aires in La Plata. At first he worked as an accountant, and later he became the head of the Statistics Office. He created the Office for Anthropometric Identification and later the Center for Dactyloscopy, of which he was the director.

After studying Bertillon's identification procedure and Francis Galton's fingerprint experiments, he intensively began to research and study papillary lines. When he studied a number of existing fingerprint classification methods and noticed a number of shortcomings, he established his own fingerprint classification system, which he called iconophalangometry. In 1891, Vucetic formed the Register of Iconophalangeometry, where Julio Torres, whom he typed on the so-called fichu (cardboard). Applying his system in practice, he solved the case of Francisco Rojas, who accused her lover of murdering her children. He dactyloscoped the mother and compared her fingerprints to the bloody papillary line prints found on the wooden door frame, and confirmed that they were identical.

In 1905, his fingerprint system was adopted by the Buenos Aires Police, later the Federal Police of Argentina. In 1907, the Academy of Sciences in Paris announced that the human identification system developed by Vucetic was the most accurate known at that time.

He married three times. After public protests in 1917 in Argentina against the general obligation to identify people associated with his name, he retired to the city of Dolores, Buenos Aires province, where he died, suffering from cancer and tuberculosis.

Daktilogram website is dedicated to Ivan Vucetic by cyber investigator Katarina Ostojic.