Content identification based on digital fingerprinting attracts a lot of attention in different emerging applications. In this paper, we consider digital identification based on the sign-magnitude decomposition of fingerprint codewords and analyze the achievable rates for each component. We introduce a channel splitting approach and reveal certain interesting phenomena related to channel polarization. It is demonstrated that under certain conditions almost all rate in the sign channel is concentrated in reliable components, this can be of interest for complexity and security in various content identification applications. The envisioned extensions cover applications where the input and output alphabets of the channel are different at the encoding and decoding stages. Additionally, the reduction of the input data dimensionality at the encoding/enrollment stage can increase the cryptographic protection in terms of privacy leakage and simplify the decoding algorithms in biometric applications.