Real time ridge orientation estimation for fingerprint images

Fingerprint verification is an important bio-metric technique for personal identification. Most of the automatic verification systems are based on matching of fingerprint minutiae. Extraction of minutiae is an essential process which requires estimation of orientation of the lines in an image. Most of the existing methods involve intense mathematical computations and hence are performed through software means. In this paper a hardware scheme to perform real time orientation estimation is presented which is based on pipelined architecture. Synthesized circuits proved the functionality and accuracy of the suggested method.Comment: 8 pages, 15 figures, 1 tabl

A New Path to Construct Parametric Orientation Field: Sparse FOMFE Model and Compressed Sparse FOMFE Model

Orientation field, representing the fingerprint ridge structure direction, plays a crucial role in fingerprint-related image processing tasks. Orientation field is able to be constructed by either non-parametric or parametric methods. In this paper, the advantages and disadvantages regarding to the existing non-parametric and parametric approaches are briefly summarized. With the further investigation for constructing the orientation field by parametric technique, two new models - sparse FOMFE model and compressed sparse FOMFE model are introduced, based on the rapidly developing signal sparse representation and compressed sensing theories. The experiments on high-quality fingerprint image dataset (plain and rolled print) and poor-quality fingerprint image dataset (latent print) demonstrate their feasibilities to construct the orientation field in a sparse or even compressed sparse mode. The comparisons among the state-of-art orientation field modeling approaches show that the proposed two models have the potential availability in big data-oriented fingerprint indexing tasks

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

Fingerprint Distortion Rectification using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Elastic distortion of fingerprints has a negative effect on the performance of fingerprint recognition systems. This negative effect brings inconvenience to users in authentication applications. However, in the negative recognition scenario where users may intentionally distort their fingerprints, this can be a serious problem since distortion will prevent recognition system from identifying malicious users. Current methods aimed at addressing this problem still have limitations. They are often not accurate because they estimate distortion parameters based on the ridge frequency map and orientation map of input samples, which are not reliable due to distortion. Secondly, they are not efficient and requiring significant computation time to rectify samples. In this paper, we develop a rectification model based on a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) to accurately estimate distortion parameters from the input image. Using a comprehensive database of synthetic distorted samples, the DCNN learns to accurately estimate distortion bases ten times faster than the dictionary search methods used in the previous approaches. Evaluating the proposed method on public databases of distorted samples shows that it can significantly improve the matching performance of distorted samples.Comment: Accepted at ICB 201

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

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

Generative Convolutional Networks for Latent Fingerprint Reconstruction

Performance of fingerprint recognition depends heavily on the extraction of minutiae points. Enhancement of the fingerprint ridge pattern is thus an essential pre-processing step that noticeably reduces false positive and negative detection rates. A particularly challenging setting is when the fingerprint images are corrupted or partially missing. In this work, we apply generative convolutional networks to denoise visible minutiae and predict the missing parts of the ridge pattern. The proposed enhancement approach is tested as a pre-processing step in combination with several standard feature extraction methods such as MINDTCT, followed by biometric comparison using MCC and BOZORTH3. We evaluate our method on several publicly available latent fingerprint datasets captured using different sensors

Fingerprint liveness detection using local quality features

Fingerprint-based recognition has been widely deployed in various applications. However, current recognition systems are vulnerable to spoofing attacks which make use of an artificial replica of a fingerprint to deceive the sensors. In such scenarios, fingerprint liveness detection ensures the actual presence of a real legitimate fingerprint in contrast to a fake self-manufactured synthetic sample. In this paper, we propose a static software-based approach using quality features to detect the liveness in a fingerprint. We have extracted features from a single fingerprint image to overcome the issues faced in dynamic software-based approaches which require longer computational time and user cooperation. The proposed system extracts 8 sensor independent quality features on a local level containing minute details of the ridge-valley structure of real and fake fingerprints. These local quality features constitutes a 13-dimensional feature vector. The system is tested on a publically available dataset of LivDet 2009 competition. The experimental results exhibit supremacy of the proposed method over current state-of-the-art approaches providing least average classification error of 5.3% for LivDet 2009. Additionally, effectiveness of the best performing features over LivDet 2009 is evaluated on the latest LivDet 2015 dataset which contain fingerprints fabricated using unknown spoof materials. An average classification error rate of 4.22% is achieved in comparison with 4.49% obtained by the LivDet 2015 winner. Further, the proposed system utilizes a single fingerprint image, which results in faster implications and makes it more user-friendly.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figures, 7 Table

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

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