Automated Latent Fingerprint Recognition
This addresses a critical need for law enforcement and forensic agencies to improve the accuracy of matching latent fingerprints from crime scenes to large databases, with incremental improvements over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of low accuracy in automated latent fingerprint recognition by proposing an algorithm that uses Convolutional Neural Networks for ridge flow estimation and minutiae extraction, achieving rank-1 identification accuracies of 64.7% on NIST SD27 and 75.3% on WVU databases against a 100K reference database, which are the best published results and competitive with a leading commercial system.
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.