Fingerprint Image-Quality Estimation and its Application to Multialgorithm Verification

Signal-quality awareness has been found to increase recognition rates and to support decisions in multisensor environments significantly. Nevertheless, automatic quality assessment is still an open issue. Here, we study the orientation tensor of fingerprint images to quantify signal impairments, such as noise, lack of structure, blur, with the help of symmetry descriptors. A strongly reduced reference is especially favorable in biometrics, but less information is not sufficient for the approach. This is also supported by numerous experiments involving a simpler quality estimator, a trained method (NFIQ), as well as the human perception of fingerprint quality on several public databases. Furthermore, quality measurements are extensively reused to adapt fusion parameters in a monomodal multialgorithm fingerprint recognition environment. In this study, several trained and nontrained score-level fusion schemes are investigated. A Bayes-based strategy for incorporating experts past performances and current quality conditions, a novel cascaded scheme for computational efficiency, besides simple fusion rules, is presented. The quantitative results favor quality awareness under all aspects, boosting recognition rates and fusing differently skilled experts efficiently as well as effectively (by training).Comment: Published at IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Securit

A new algorithm for minutiae extraction and matching in fingerprint

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.A novel algorithm for fingerprint template formation and matching in automatic fingerprint recognition has been developed. At present, fingerprint is being considered as the dominant biometric trait among all other biometrics due to its wide range of applications in security and access control. Most of the commercially established systems use singularity point (SP) or ‘core’ point for fingerprint indexing and template formation. The efficiency of these systems heavily relies on the detection of the core and the quality of the image itself. The number of multiple SPs or absence of ‘core’ on the image can cause some anomalies in the formation of the template and may result in high False Acceptance Rate (FAR) or False Rejection Rate (FRR). Also the loss of actual minutiae or appearance of new or spurious minutiae in the scanned image can contribute to the error in the matching process. A more sophisticated algorithm is therefore necessary in the formation and matching of templates in order to achieve low FAR and FRR and to make the identification more accurate. The novel algorithm presented here does not rely on any ‘core’ or SP thus makes the structure invariant with respect to global rotation and translation. Moreover, it does not need orientation of the minutiae points on which most of the established algorithm are based. The matching methodology is based on the local features of each minutiae point such as distances to its nearest neighbours and their internal angle. Using a publicly available fingerprint database, the algorithm has been evaluated and compared with other benchmark algorithms. It has been found that the algorithm has performed better compared to others and has been able to achieve an error equal rate of 3.5%

Error propagation in pattern recognition systems: Impact of quality on fingerprint categorization

The aspect of quality in pattern classification has recently been explored in the context of biometric identification and authentication systems. The results presented in the literature indicate that incorporating information about quality of the input pattern leads to improved classification performance. The quality itself, however, can be defined in a number of ways, and its role in the various stages of pattern classification is often ambiguous or ad hoc. In this dissertation a more systematic approach to the incorporation of localized quality metrics into the pattern recognition process is developed for the specific task of fingerprint categorization. Quality is defined not as an intrinsic property of the image, but rather in terms of a set of defects introduced to it. A number of fingerprint images have been examined and the important quality defects have been identified and modeled in a mathematically tractable way. The models are flexible and can be used to generate synthetic images that can facilitate algorithm development and large scale, less time consuming performance testing. The effect of quality defects on various stages of the fingerprint recognition process are examined both analytically and empirically. For these defect models, it is shown that the uncertainty of parameter estimates, i.e. extracted fingerprint features, is the key quantity that can be calculated and propagated forward through the stages of the fingerprint classification process. Modified image processing techniques that explicitly utilize local quality metrics in the extraction of features useful in fingerprint classification, such as ridge orientation flow field, are presented and their performance is investigated

Image quality assessment for iris biometric

Iris recognition, the ability to recognize and distinguish individuals by their iris pattern, is the most reliable biometric in terms of recognition and identification performance. However, performance of these systems is affected by poor quality imaging. In this work, we extend previous research efforts on iris quality assessment by analyzing the effect of seven quality factors: defocus blur, motion blur, off-angle, occlusion, specular reflection, lighting, and pixel-counts on the performance of traditional iris recognition system. We have concluded that defocus blur, motion blur, and off-angle are the factors that affect recognition performance the most. We further designed a fully automated iris image quality evaluation block that operates in two steps. First each factor is estimated individually, then the second step involves fusing the estimated factors by using Dempster-Shafer theory approach to evidential reasoning. The designed block is tested on two datasets, CASIA 1.0 and a dataset collected at WVU. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Strategies for intelligent interaction management and usability of biometric systems

Fingerprint biometric systems are one of the most popular biometric systems in current use, which takes a standard measure of a person's fingerprint to compare against the measure from an original stored template, which they have pre-acquired and associated with the known personal identification claimed by the user. Generally, the fingerprint biometric system consists of three stages including a data acquisition stage, a feature extraction stage and a matching extraction. This study will explore some essential limitations of an automatic fingerprint biometric system relating to the effects of capturing poor quality fingerprint images in a fingerprint biometric system and will investigate the interrelationship between the quality of a fingerprint image and other primary components of a fingerprint biometric system, such as the feature extraction operation and the matching process. In order to improve the overall performance of an automatic fingerprint biometric system, the study will investigate some possible ways to overcome these limitations. With the purpose of acquisition of an acceptable quality of fingerprint images, three components/enhancements are added into the traditional fingerprint recognition system in our proposed system. These are a fingerprint image enhancement algorithm, a fingerprint image quality evaluation algorithm and a feedback unit, the purpose of which is to provide analytical information collected at the image capture stage to the system user. In this thesis, all relevant information will be introduced, and we will also show some experimental results obtained with the proposed algorithms, and comparative studies with other existed algorithms will also be presented

Fast fingerprint verification using sub-regions of fingerprint images.

Chan Ka Cheong.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 77-85).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Chapter 1. --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Introduction to Fingerprint Verification --- p.1Chapter 1.1.1 --- Biometrics --- p.1Chapter 1.1.2 --- Fingerprint History --- p.2Chapter 1.1.3 --- Fingerprint characteristics --- p.4Chapter 1.1.4 --- A Generic Fingerprint Matching System Architecture --- p.6Chapter 1.1.5 --- Fingerprint Verification and Identification --- p.8Chapter 1.1.7 --- Biometric metrics --- p.10Chapter 1.2 --- Embedded system --- p.12Chapter 1.2.1 --- Introduction to embedded systems --- p.12Chapter 1.2.2 --- Embedded systems characteristics --- p.12Chapter 1.2.3 --- Performance evaluation of a StrongARM processor --- p.13Chapter 1.3 --- Objective -An embedded fingerprint verification system --- p.16Chapter 1.4 --- Organization of the Thesis --- p.17Chapter 2 --- Literature Reviews --- p.18Chapter 2.1 --- Fingerprint matching overviews --- p.18Chapter 2.1.1 --- Minutiae-based fingerprint matching --- p.20Chapter 2.2 --- Fingerprint image enhancement --- p.21Chapter 2.3 --- Orientation field Computation --- p.22Chapter 2.4 --- Fingerprint Segmentation --- p.24Chapter 2.5 --- Singularity Detection --- p.25Chapter 2.6 --- Fingerprint Classification --- p.27Chapter 2.7 --- Minutia extraction --- p.30Chapter 2.7.1 --- Binarization and thinning --- p.30Chapter 2.7.2 --- Direct gray scale approach --- p.32Chapter 2.7.3 --- Comparison of the minutiae extraction approaches --- p.35Chapter 2.8 --- Minutiae matching --- p.37Chapter 2.8.1 --- Point matching --- p.37Chapter 2.8.2 --- Structural matching technique --- p.38Chapter 2.9 --- Summary --- p.40Chapter 3. --- Implementation --- p.41Chapter 3.1 --- Fast Fingerprint Matching System Overview --- p.41Chapter 3.1.1 --- Typical Fingerprint Matching System --- p.41Chapter 3.1.2. --- Fast Fingerprint Matching System Overview --- p.41Chapter 3.2 --- Orientation computation --- p.43Chapter 3.21 --- Orientation computation --- p.43Chapter 3.22 --- Smooth orientation field --- p.43Chapter 3.3 --- Fingerprint image segmentation --- p.45Chapter 3.4 --- Reference Point Extraction --- p.46Chapter 3.5 --- A Classification Scheme --- p.51Chapter 3.6 --- Finding A Small Fingerprint Matching Area --- p.54Chapter 3.7 --- Fingerprint Matching --- p.57Chapter 3.8 --- Minutiae extraction --- p.59Chapter 3.8.1 --- Ridge tracing --- p.59Chapter 3.8.2 --- cross sectioning --- p.60Chapter 3.8.3 --- local maximum determination --- p.61Chapter 3.8.4 --- Ridge tracing marking --- p.62Chapter 3.8.5 --- Ridge tracing stop criteria --- p.63Chapter 3.9 --- Optimization technique --- p.65Chapter 3.10 --- Summary --- p.66Chapter 4. --- Experimental results --- p.67Chapter 4.1 --- Experimental setup --- p.67Chapter 4.2 --- Fingerprint database --- p.67Chapter 4.3 --- Reference point accuracy --- p.67Chapter 4.4 --- Variable number of matching minutiae results --- p.68Chapter 4.5 --- Contribution of the verification prototype --- p.72Chapter 5. --- Conclusion and Future Research --- p.74Chapter 5.1 --- Conclusion --- p.74Chapter 5.2 --- Future Research --- p.74Bibliography --- p.7

Bio : A Mulrimodal biometric authentication system for person identification and verification

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