Two-stage quality adaptive fingerprint image enhancement using Fuzzy c-means clustering based fingerprint quality analysis

Fingerprint recognition techniques are immensely dependent on quality of the fingerprint images. To improve the performance of recognition algorithm for poor quality images an efficient enhancement algorithm should be designed. Performance improvement of recognition algorithm will be more if enhancement process is adaptive to the fingerprint quality (wet, dry or normal). In this paper, a quality adaptive fingerprint enhancement algorithm is proposed. The proposed fingerprint quality assessment algorithm clusters the fingerprint images in appropriate quality class of dry, wet, normal dry, normal wet and good quality using fuzzy c-means technique. It considers seven features namely, mean, moisture, variance, uniformity, contrast, ridge valley area uniformity and ridge valley uniformity into account for clustering the fingerprint images in appropriate quality class. Fingerprint images of each quality class undergo through a two-stage fingerprint quality enhancement process. A quality adaptive preprocessing method is used as front-end before enhancing the fingerprint images with Gabor, short term Fourier transform and oriented diffusion filtering based enhancement techniques. Experimental results show improvement in the verification results for FVC2004 datasets. Significant improvement in equal error rate is observed while using quality adaptive preprocessing based approaches in comparison to the current state-of-the-art enhancement techniques.Comment: 34 pages, 8 figures, Submitted to Image and Vision Computin

An Iterative Fingerprint Enhancement Algorithm Based on Accurate Determination of Orientation Flow

We describe an algorithm to enhance and binarize a fingerprint image. The algorithm is based on accurate determination of orientation flow of the ridges of the fingerprint image by computing variance of the neighborhood pixels around a pixel in different directions. We show that an iterative algorithm which captures the mutual interdependence of orientation flow computation, enhancement and binarization gives very good results on poor quality images.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures. Ongoing work. To be submitted to appropriate conference/journa

An Effective Method for Fingerprint Classification

This paper presents an effective method for fingerprint classification using data mining approach. Initially, it generates a numeric code sequence for each fingerprint image based on the ridge flow patterns. Then for each class, a seed is selected by using a frequent itemsets generation technique. These seeds are subsequently used for clustering the fingerprint images. The proposed method was tested and evaluated in terms of several real-life datasets and a significant improvement in reducing the misclassification errors has been noticed in comparison to its other counterparts.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, 6 tables referred journal publication. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1211.450

A Stable Minutia Descriptor based on Gabor Wavelet and Linear Discriminant Analysis

The minutia descriptor which describes characteristics of minutia, plays a major role in fingerprint recognition. Typically, fingerprint recognition systems employ minutia descriptors to find potential correspondence between minutiae, and they use similarity between two minutia descriptors to calculate overall similarity between two fingerprint images. A good minutia descriptor can improve recognition accuracy of fingerprint recognition system and largely reduce comparing time. A good minutia descriptor should have high ability to distinguish between different minutiae and at the same time should be robust in difficult conditions including poor quality image and small size image. It also should be effective in computational cost of similarity among descriptors. In this paper, a robust minutia descriptor is constructed using Gabor wavelet and linear discriminant analysis. This minutia descriptor has high distinguishing ability, stability and simple comparing method. Experimental results on FVC2004 and FVC2006 databases show that the proposed minutia descriptor is very effective in fingerprint recognition

Minutiae Extraction from Fingerprint Images - a Review

Fingerprints are the oldest and most widely used form of biometric identification. Everyone is known to have unique, immutable fingerprints. As most Automatic Fingerprint Recognition Systems are based on local ridge features known as minutiae, marking minutiae accurately and rejecting false ones is very important. However, fingerprint images get degraded and corrupted due to variations in skin and impression conditions. Thus, image enhancement techniques are employed prior to minutiae extraction. A critical step in automatic fingerprint matching is to reliably extract minutiae from the input fingerprint images. This paper presents a review of a large number of techniques present in the literature for extracting fingerprint minutiae. The techniques are broadly classified as those working on binarized images and those that work on gray scale images directly.Comment: 12 pages; IJCSI International Journal of Computer Science Issues, Vol. 8, Issue 5, September 201

An Effective Fingerprint Classification and Search Method

This paper presents an effective fingerprint classification method designed based on a hierarchical agglomerative clustering technique. The performance of the technique was evaluated in terms of several real-life datasets and a significant improvement in reducing the misclassification error has been noticed. This paper also presents a query based faster fingerprint search method over the clustered fingerprint databases. The retrieval accuracy of the search method has been found effective in light of several real-life databases.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 6 tables, referred journal publicatio

Bio-Authentication based Secure Transmission System using Steganography

Biometrics deals with identity verification of an individual by using certain physiological or behavioral features associated with a person. Biometric identification systems using fingerprints patterns are called AFIS (Automatic Fingerprint Identification System). In this paper a composite method for Fingerprint recognition is considered using a combination of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and Sobel Filters for improvement of a poor quality fingerprint image. Steganography hides messages inside other messages in such a way that an "adversary" would not even know a secret message were present. The objective of our paper is to make a bio-secure system. In this paper bio-authentication has been implemented in terms of finger print recognition and the second part of the paper is an interactive steganographic system hides the user's data by two options- creating a songs list or hiding the data in an image.Comment: IEEE Publication format, International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security, IJCSIS, Vol. 8 No. 1, April 2010, USA. ISSN 1947 5500, http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis

Fingerprint Recognition Using Minutia Score Matching

The popular Biometric used to authenticate a person is Fingerprint which is unique and permanent throughout a person's life. A minutia matching is widely used for fingerprint recognition and can be classified as ridge ending and ridge bifurcation. In this paper we projected Fingerprint Recognition using Minutia Score Matching method (FRMSM). For Fingerprint thinning, the Block Filter is used, which scans the image at the boundary to preserves the quality of the image and extract the minutiae from the thinned image. The false matching ratio is better compared to the existing algorithm.Comment: 8 Page

Automated Latent Fingerprint Recognition

Latent fingerprints are one of the most important and widely used evidence in law enforcement and forensic agencies worldwide. Yet, NIST evaluations show that the performance of state-of-the-art latent recognition systems is far from satisfactory. An automated latent fingerprint recognition system with high accuracy is essential to compare latents found at crime scenes to a large collection of reference prints to generate a candidate list of possible mates. In this paper, we propose an automated latent fingerprint recognition algorithm that utilizes Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) for ridge flow estimation and minutiae descriptor extraction, and extract complementary templates (two minutiae templates and one texture template) to represent the latent. The comparison scores between the latent and a reference print based on the three templates are fused to retrieve a short candidate list from the reference database. Experimental results show that the rank-1 identification accuracies (query latent is matched with its true mate in the reference database) are 64.7% for the NIST SD27 and 75.3% for the WVU latent databases, against a reference database of 100K rolled prints. These results are the best among published papers on latent recognition and competitive with the performance (66.7% and 70.8% rank-1 accuracies on NIST SD27 and WVU DB, respectively) of a leading COTS latent Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). By score-level (rank-level) fusion of our system with the commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) latent AFIS, the overall rank-1 identification performance can be improved from 64.7% and 75.3% to 73.3% (74.4%) and 76.6% (78.4%) on NIST SD27 and WVU latent databases, respectively

Perfect Fingerprint Orientation Fields by Locally Adaptive Global Models

Fingerprint recognition is widely used for verification and identification in many commercial, governmental and forensic applications. The orientation field (OF) plays an important role at various processing stages in fingerprint recognition systems. OFs are used for image enhancement, fingerprint alignment, for fingerprint liveness detection, fingerprint alteration detection and fingerprint matching. In this paper, a novel approach is presented to globally model an OF combined with locally adaptive methods. We show that this model adapts perfectly to the 'true OF' in the limit. This perfect OF is described by a small number of parameters with straightforward geometric interpretation. Applications are manifold: Quick expert marking of very poor quality (for instance latent) OFs, high fidelity low parameter OF compression and a direct road to ground truth OFs markings for large databases, say. In this contribution we describe an algorithm to perfectly estimate OF parameters automatically or semi-automatically, depending on image quality, and we establish the main underlying claim of high fidelity low parameter OF compression