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

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

Latent Fingerprint Registration via Matching Densely Sampled Points

Latent fingerprint matching is a very important but unsolved problem. As a key step of fingerprint matching, fingerprint registration has a great impact on the recognition performance. Existing latent fingerprint registration approaches are mainly based on establishing correspondences between minutiae, and hence will certainly fail when there are no sufficient number of extracted minutiae due to small fingerprint area or poor image quality. Minutiae extraction has become the bottleneck of latent fingerprint registration. In this paper, we propose a non-minutia latent fingerprint registration method which estimates the spatial transformation between a pair of fingerprints through a dense fingerprint patch alignment and matching procedure. Given a pair of fingerprints to match, we bypass the minutiae extraction step and take uniformly sampled points as key points. Then the proposed patch alignment and matching algorithm compares all pairs of sampling points and produces their similarities along with alignment parameters. Finally, a set of consistent correspondences are found by spectral clustering. Extensive experiments on NIST27 database and MOLF database show that the proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art registration performance, especially under challenging conditions

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 Effective Fingerprint Verification Technique

This paper presents an effective method for fingerprint verification based on a data mining technique called minutiae clustering and a graph-theoretic approach to analyze the process of fingerprint comparison to give a feature space representation of minutiae and to produce a lower bound on the number of detectably distinct fingerprints. The method also proving the invariance of each individual fingerprint by using both the topological behavior of the minutiae graph and also using a distance measure called Hausdorff distance.The method provides a graph based index generation mechanism of fingerprint biometric data. The self-organizing map neural network is also used for classifying the fingerprints.Comment: Submitted to Journal of Computer Science and Engineering, see http://sites.google.com/site/jcseuk/volume-1-issue-1-may-201

Skilled Impostor Attacks Against Fingerprint Verification Systems And Its Remedy

Fingerprint verification systems are becoming ubiquitous in everyday life. This trend is propelled especially by the proliferation of mobile devices with fingerprint sensors such as smartphones and tablet computers, and fingerprint verification is increasingly applied for authenticating financial transactions. In this study we describe a novel attack vector against fingerprint verification systems which we coin skilled impostor attack. We show that existing protocols for performance evaluation of fingerprint verification systems are flawed and as a consequence of this, the system's real vulnerability is systematically underestimated. We examine a scenario in which a fingerprint verification system is tuned to operate at false acceptance rate of 0.1% using the traditional verification protocols with random impostors (zero-effort attacks). We demonstrate that an active and intelligent attacker can achieve a chance of success in the area of 89% or more against this system by performing skilled impostor attacks. We describe a new protocol for evaluating fingerprint verification performance in order to improve the assessment of potential and limitations of fingerprint recognition systems. This new evaluation protocol enables a more informed decision concerning the operating threshold in practical applications and the respective trade-off between security (low false acceptance rates) and usability (low false rejection rates). The skilled impostor attack is a general attack concept which is independent of specific databases or comparison algorithms. The proposed protocol relying on skilled impostor attacks can directly be applied for evaluating the verification performance of other biometric modalities such as e.g. iris, face, ear, finger vein, gait or speaker recognition

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

End-to-End Latent Fingerprint Search

Latent fingerprints are one of the most important and widely used sources of evidence in law enforcement and forensic agencies. Yet the performance of the state-of-the-art latent recognition systems is far from satisfactory, and they often require manual markups to boost the latent search performance. Further, the COTS systems are proprietary and do not output the true comparison scores between a latent and reference prints to conduct quantitative evidential analysis. We present an end-to-end latent fingerprint search system, including automated region of interest (ROI) cropping, latent image preprocessing, feature extraction, feature comparison , and outputs a candidate list. Two separate minutiae extraction models provide complementary minutiae templates. To compensate for the small number of minutiae in small area and poor quality latents, a virtual minutiae set is generated to construct a texture template. A 96-dimensional descriptor is extracted for each minutia from its neighborhood. For computational efficiency, the descriptor length for virtual minutiae is further reduced to 16 using product quantization. Our end-to-end system is evaluated on three latent databases: NIST SD27 (258 latents); MSP (1,200 latents), WVU (449 latents) and N2N (10,000 latents) against a background set of 100K rolled prints, which includes the true rolled mates of the latents with rank-1 retrieval rates of 65.7%, 69.4%, 65.5%, and 7.6% respectively. A multi-core solution implemented on 24 cores obtains 1ms per latent to rolled comparison

Portable Trust: biometric-based authentication and blockchain storage for self-sovereign identity systems

We devised a mobile biometric-based authentication system only relying on local processing. Our Android open source solution explores the capability of current smartphones to acquire, process and match fingerprints using only its built-in hardware. Our architecture is specifically designed to run completely locally and autonomously, not requiring any cloud service, server, or permissioned access to fingerprint reader hardware. It involves three main stages, starting with the fingerprint acquisition using the smartphone camera, followed by a processing pipeline to obtain minutiae features and a final step for matching against other locally stored fingerprints, based on Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) descriptors. We obtained a mean matching accuracy of 55%, with the highest value of 67% for thumb fingers. Our ability to capture and process a finger fingerprint in mere seconds using a smartphone makes this work usable in a wide range of scenarios, for instance, offline remote regions. This work is specifically designed to be a key building block for a self-sovereign identity solution and integrate with our permissionless blockchain for identity and key attestation.Comment: Delft University of Technology student project repor

Generalizing Fingerprint Spoof Detector: Learning a One-Class Classifier

Prevailing fingerprint recognition systems are vulnerable to spoof attacks. To mitigate these attacks, automated spoof detectors are trained to distinguish a set of live or bona fide fingerprints from a set of known spoof fingerprints. Despite their success, spoof detectors remain vulnerable when exposed to attacks from spoofs made with materials not seen during training of the detector. To alleviate this shortcoming, we approach spoof detection as a one-class classification problem. The goal is to train a spoof detector on only the live fingerprints such that once the concept of "live" has been learned, spoofs of any material can be rejected. We accomplish this through training multiple generative adversarial networks (GANS) on live fingerprint images acquired with the open source, dual-camera, 1900 ppi RaspiReader fingerprint reader. Our experimental results, conducted on 5.5K spoof images (from 12 materials) and 11.8K live images show that the proposed approach improves the cross-material spoof detection performance over state-of-the-art one-class and binary class spoof detectors on 11 of 12 testing materials and 7 of 12 testing materials, respectively