Automatic Dataset Annotation to Learn CNN Pore Description for Fingerprint Recognition
This work addresses fingerprint recognition for security applications by providing a data-driven alternative to hand-crafted descriptors, though it is incremental as it builds on existing pore-based methods.
The paper tackles the problem of high-resolution fingerprint recognition by learning robust local pore descriptors with a CNN, using automatic dataset annotation for training, and achieves improved state-of-the-art results on a public benchmark for both partial and full fingerprints.
High-resolution fingerprint recognition often relies on sophisticated matching algorithms based on hand-crafted keypoint descriptors, with pores being the most common keypoint choice. Our method is the opposite of the prevalent approach: we use instead a simple matching algorithm based on robust local pore descriptors that are learned from the data using a CNN. In order to train this CNN in a fully supervised manner, we describe how the automatic alignment of fingerprint images can be used to obtain the required training annotations, which are otherwise missing in all publicly available datasets. This improves the state-of-the-art recognition results for both partial and full fingerprints in a public benchmark. To confirm that the observed improvement is due to the adoption of learned descriptors, we conduct an ablation study using the most successful pore descriptors previously used in the literature. All our code is available at https://github.com/gdahia/high-res-fingerprint-recognition