A Study on Automatic Latent Fingerprint Identification System

Latent fingerprints are the unintentional impressions found at the crime scenes and are considered crucial evidence in criminal identification. Law enforcement and forensic agencies have been using latent fingerprints as testimony in courts. However, since the latent fingerprints are accidentally leftover on different surfaces, the lifted prints look inferior. Therefore, a tremendous amount of research is being carried out in automatic latent fingerprint identification to improve the overall fingerprint recognition performance. As a result, there is an ever-growing demand to develop reliable and robust systems. In this regard, we present a comprehensive literature review of the existing methods utilized in latent fingerprint acquisition, segmentation, quality assessment, enhancement, feature extraction, and matching steps. Later, we provide insight into different benchmark latent datasets available to perform research in this area. Our study highlights various research challenges and gaps by performing detailed analysis on the existing state-of-the-art segmentation, enhancement, extraction, and matching approaches to strengthen the research

A Universal Latent Fingerprint Enhancer Using Transformers

Forensic science heavily relies on analyzing latent fingerprints, which are crucial for criminal investigations. However, various challenges, such as background noise, overlapping prints, and contamination, make the identification process difficult. Moreover, limited access to real crime scene and laboratory-generated databases hinders the development of efficient recognition algorithms. This study aims to develop a fast method, which we call ULPrint, to enhance various latent fingerprint types, including those obtained from real crime scenes and laboratory-created samples, to boost fingerprint recognition system performance. In closed-set identification accuracy experiments, the enhanced image was able to improve the performance of the MSU-AFIS from 61.56\% to 75.19\% in the NIST SD27 database, from 67.63\% to 77.02\% in the MSP Latent database, and from 46.90\% to 52.12\% in the NIST SD302 database. Our contributions include (1) the development of a two-step latent fingerprint enhancement method that combines Ridge Segmentation with UNet and Mix Visual Transformer (MiT) SegFormer-B5 encoder architecture, (2) the implementation of multiple dilated convolutions in the UNet architecture to capture intricate, non-local patterns better and enhance ridge segmentation, and (3) the guided blending of the predicted ridge mask with the latent fingerprint. This novel approach, ULPrint, streamlines the enhancement process, addressing challenges across diverse latent fingerprint types to improve forensic investigations and criminal justice outcomes

A Review of Fingerprint Feature Representations and Their Applications for Latent Fingerprint Identification: Trends and Evaluation

Latent fingerprint identification is attracting increasing interest because of its important role in law enforcement. Although the use of various fingerprint features might be required for successful latent fingerprint identification, methods based on minutiae are often readily applicable and commonly outperform other methods. However, as many fingerprint feature representations exist, we sought to determine if the selection of feature representation has an impact on the performance of automated fingerprint identification systems. In this paper, we review the most prominent fingerprint feature representations reported in the literature, identify trends in fingerprint feature representation, and observe that representations designed for verification are commonly used in latent fingerprint identification. We aim to evaluate the performance of the most popular fingerprint feature representations over a common latent fingerprint database. Therefore, we introduce and apply a protocol that evaluates minutia descriptors for latent fingerprint identification in terms of the identification rate plotted in the cumulative match characteristic (CMC) curve. From our experiments, we found that all the evaluated minutia descriptors obtained identification rates lower than 10% for Rank-1 and 24% for Rank-100 comparing the minutiae in the database NIST SD27, illustrating the need of new minutia descriptors for latent fingerprint identification.This work was supported in part by the National Council of Science and Technology of Mexico (CONACYT) under Grant PN-720 and Grant 63894

DPD-DFF: a dual phase distributed scheme with double fingerprint fusion for fast and accurate identification in large databases

Nowadays, many companies and institutions need fast and reliable identification systems that are able to deal with very large databases. Fingerprints are among the most used biometric traits for identification. In the current literature there are fingerprint matching algorithms that are focused on efficiency, whilst others are based on accuracy. In this paper we propose a flexible dual phase identification method, called DPD-DFF, that combines two fingers and two matchers within a hybrid fusion scheme to obtain both fast and accurate results. Different alternatives are designed to find a trade-off between runtime and accuracy that can be further tuned with a single parameter. The experiments show that DPD-DFF obtains very competitive results in comparison with the state-of-the-art score fusion techniques, especially when dealing with large databases or impostor fingerprints

The fundamentals of unimodal palmprint authentication based on a biometric system: A review

Biometric system can be defined as the automated method of identifying or authenticating the identity of a living person based on physiological or behavioral traits. Palmprint biometric-based authentication has gained considerable attention in recent years. Globally, enterprises have been exploring biometric authorization for some time, for the purpose of security, payment processing, law enforcement CCTV systems, and even access to offices, buildings, and gyms via the entry doors. Palmprint biometric system can be divided into unimodal and multimodal. This paper will investigate the biometric system and provide a detailed overview of the palmprint technology with existing recognition approaches. Finally, we introduce a review of previous works based on a unimodal palmprint system using different databases

Interpol review of fingermarks and other body impressions 2016–2019

This review paper covers the forensic-relevant literature in fingerprint and bodily impression sciences from 2016 to 2019 as a part of the 19th Interpol International Forensic Science Managers Symposium. The review papers are also available at the Interpol website at: https://www.interpol.int/content/download/ 14458/file/Interpol%20 Review%20 Papers%202019. pdf