Hierarchical fusion for matching simultaneous latent fingerprint

Abstract: Despite the large body of work on fingerprint identification systems, most of it focused on using specialized devices. Due to the high price of such devices, some researchers directed their attention to digital cameras as an alternative source for fingerprints images. However, such sources introduce new challenges related to image quality. Specifically, most digital cameras compress captured images before storing them leading to potential losses of information. This study comes to address the need to determine the optimum ratio of the fingerprint image compression to ensure the fingerprint identification system’s high accuracy. This study is conducted using a large in-house dataset of raw images. Therefore, all fingerprint information is stored in order to determine the compression ratio accurately. The results proved that the used software functioned perfectly until a compression ratio of (30–40%) of the raw images; any higher ratio would negatively affect the accuracy of the used system.

Abstract: Latent fingerprint has been used as evidence in the court of law for over 100 years. However, even today, a completely automated latent fingerprint system has not been achieved. Researchers have identified several important challenges in latent fingerprint recognition: 1) low information content; 2) presence of background noise and nonlinear ridge distortion; 3) need for an established scientific procedure for matching latent fingerprints; and 4) lack of publicly available latent fingerprint databases. The process of automatic latent fingerprint matching is divided into five definite stages, and this paper discusses the existing algorithms, limitations, and future research directions in each of the stages.

Abstract: Latent fingerprints are important evidences used by law enforcement agencies. However, current state-of-the-art for automatic latent fingerprint recognition is not as reliable as live-scan fingerprints and advancements are required in every step of the recognition pipeline. This research focuses on automatically segmenting latent fingerprints to distinguish between ridge and non-ridge patterns. There are three major contributions of this research: (i) a machine learning algorithm for combining five different categories of features for automatic latent fingerprint segmentation, (ii) a feature selection technique using modified RELIEF formulation for analyzing the influence of multiple category features on latent fingerprint segmentation, and (iii) a novel SIVV based metric to measure the effect of the segmentation algorithm without the requirement to perform the entire matching process. The image is tessellated into local patches and saliency based features along with image, gradient, ridge, and quality based features are extracted. Feature selection is performed to study the contribution of the various category features towards foreground ridge pattern representation. Using these selected features, a trained Random Decision Forest based algorithm classifies the local patches as background or foreground. The results on three publicly available databases demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.

Abstract: Large-scale fingerprint recognition involves capturing ridge patterns at different time intervals using various methods, such as live-scan and paper-ink approaches, introducing intraclass variations in the fingerprint. The performance of existing algorithms is significantly affected when fingerprints are captured with diverse acquisition settings such as multisession, multispectral, multiresolution, with slap, and with latent fingerprints. One of the primary challenges in developing a generic and robust fingerprint matching algorithm is the limited availability of large data sets that capture such intraclass diversity. In this paper, we present the multisensor optical and latent fingerprint database of more than 19000 fingerprint images with different intraclass variations during fingerprint capture. We also showcase the baseline results of various matching experiments on this database. The database is aimed to drive research in building robust algorithms toward solving the problem of latent fingerprint matching and handling intraclass variations in fingerprint capture. Some potential applications for this database are identified and the research challenges that can be addressed using this database are also discussed.

Abstract: 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.

Abstract: Biometrics-based verification, especially fingerprint-based identification, is receiving a lot of attention. There are two major shortcomings of the traditional approaches to fingerprint representation. For a considerable fraction of population, the representations based on explicit detection of complete ridge structures in the fingerprint are difficult to extract automatically. The widely used minutiae-based representation does not utilize a significant component of the rich discriminatory information available in the fingerprints. Local ridge structures cannot be completely characterized by minutiae. Further, minutiae-based matching has difficulty in quickly matching two fingerprint images containing a different number of unregistered minutiae points. The proposed filter-based algorithm uses a bank of Gabor filters to capture both local and global details in a fingerprint as a compact fixed length FingerCode. The fingerprint matching is based on the Euclidean distance between the two corresponding FingerCodes and hence is extremely fast. We are able to achieve a verification accuracy which is only marginally inferior to the best results of minutiae-based algorithms published in the open literature. Our system performs better than a state-of-the-art minutiae-based system when the performance requirement of the application system does not demand a very low false acceptance rate. Finally, we show that the matching performance can be improved by combining the decisions of the matchers based on complementary (minutiae-based and filter-based) fingerprint information.

Abstract: The current need for large multimodal databases to evaluate automatic biometric recognition systems has motivated the development of the MCYT bimodal database. The main purpose has been to consider a large scale population, with statistical significance, in a real multimodal procedure, and including several sources of variability that can be found in real environments. The acquisition process, contents and availability of the single-session baseline corpus are fully described. Some experiments showing consistency of data through the different acquisition sites and assessing data quality are also presented.

Abstract: Multibiometric systems fuse information from different sources to compensate for the limitations in performance of individual matchers. We propose a framework for the optimal combination of match scores that is based on the likelihood ratio test. The distributions of genuine and impostor match scores are modeled as finite Gaussian mixture model. The proposed fusion approach is general in its ability to handle 1) discrete values in biometric match score distributions, 2) arbitrary scales and distributions of match scores, 3) correlation between the scores of multiple matchers, and 4) sample quality of multiple biometric sources. Experiments on three multibiometric databases indicate that the proposed fusion framework achieves consistently high performance compared to commonly used score fusion techniques based on score transformation and classification.

Abstract: Preface Introduction The First Step Toward Quantitative-Qualitative Analysis Ridgeology Revolution History of Friction Ridge Identification Primitive Knowledge Early Pioneers Scientific Researchers The Friction Ridge Medium Structure of Friction Skin Growth of Friction Skin The Identification Process Premises of Friction Ridge Identification Philosophy of Friction Ridge Identification Human Sight Methodology of Friction Ridge Identification Friction Ridge Analysis Friction Ridge Comparison Friction Ridge Evaluation Verification Poroscopy And Edgeoscopy Poroscopy Edgeoscopy Friction Ridge Analysis Report Ridgeology Study Key An Introduction To Palmar Flexion Crease Identification The Beginning Bibliography Glossary

Abstract: Latent fingerprint identification is of critical importance to law enforcement agencies in identifying suspects: Latent fingerprints are inadvertent impressions left by fingers on surfaces of objects. While tremendous progress has been made in plain and rolled fingerprint matching, latent fingerprint matching continues to be a difficult problem. Poor quality of ridge impressions, small finger area, and large nonlinear distortion are the main difficulties in latent fingerprint matching compared to plain or rolled fingerprint matching. We propose a system for matching latent fingerprints found at crime scenes to rolled fingerprints enrolled in law enforcement databases. In addition to minutiae, we also use extended features, including singularity, ridge quality map, ridge flow map, ridge wavelength map, and skeleton. We tested our system by matching 258 latents in the NIST SD27 database against a background database of 29,257 rolled fingerprints obtained by combining the NIST SD4, SD14, and SD27 databases. The minutiae-based baseline rank-1 identification rate of 34.9 percent was improved to 74 percent when extended features were used. In order to evaluate the relative importance of each extended feature, these features were incrementally used in the order of their cost in marking by latent experts. The experimental results indicate that singularity, ridge quality map, and ridge flow map are the most effective features in improving the matching accuracy.