Nicholas G. Paulter

Steven A. Grosz, Joshua J. Engelsma, Nicholas G. Paulter et al.

Prevailing evaluations of fingerprint recognition systems have been performed as end-to-end black-box tests of fingerprint identification or authentication accuracy. However, performance of the end-to-end system is subject to errors arising in any of its constituent modules, including: fingerprint scanning, preprocessing, feature extraction, and matching. Conversely, white-box evaluations provide a more granular evaluation by studying the individual sub-components of a system. While a few studies have conducted stand-alone evaluations of the fingerprint reader and feature extraction modules of fingerprint recognition systems, little work has been devoted towards white-box evaluations of the fingerprint matching module. We report results of a controlled, white-box evaluation of one open-source and two commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) minutiae-based matchers in terms of their robustness against controlled perturbations (random noise and non-linear distortions) introduced into the input minutiae feature sets. Our white-box evaluations reveal that the performance of fingerprint minutiae matchers are more susceptible to non-linear distortion and missing minutiae than spurious minutiae and small positional displacements of the minutiae locations.

Joshua J. Engelsma, Sunpreet S. Arora, Anil K. Jain et al.

We present the design and manufacturing of high fidelity universal 3D fingerprint targets, which can be imaged on a variety of fingerprint sensing technologies, namely capacitive, contact-optical, and contactless-optical. Universal 3D fingerprint targets enable, for the first time, not only a repeatable and controlled evaluation of fingerprint readers, but also the ability to conduct fingerprint reader interoperability studies. Fingerprint reader interoperability refers to how robust fingerprint recognition systems are to variations in the images acquired by different types of fingerprint readers. To build universal 3D fingerprint targets, we adopt a molding and casting framework consisting of (i) digital mapping of fingerprint images to a negative mold, (ii) CAD modeling a scaffolding system to hold the negative mold, (iii) fabricating the mold and scaffolding system with a high resolution 3D printer, (iv) producing or mixing a material with similar electrical, optical, and mechanical properties to that of the human finger, and (v) fabricating a 3D fingerprint target using controlled casting. Our experiments conducted with PIV and Appendix F certified optical (contact and contactless) and capacitive fingerprint readers demonstrate the usefulness of universal 3D fingerprint targets for controlled and repeatable fingerprint reader evaluations and also fingerprint reader interoperability studies.