A Collaborative Approach using Ridge-Valley Minutiae for More Accurate Contactless Fingerprint Identification
This work addresses the need for more reliable contactless fingerprint systems in e-business and law-enforcement, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of low matching accuracy in contactless fingerprint identification by developing a new approach that leverages ridge-valley minutiae and color-space conversions, achieving significantly higher accuracy over state-of-the-art matchers on public databases.
Contactless fingerprint identification has emerged as an reliable and user friendly alternative for the personal identification in a range of e-business and law-enforcement applications. It is however quite known from the literature that the contactless fingerprint images deliver remarkably low matching accuracies as compared with those obtained from the contact-based fingerprint sensors. This paper develops a new approach to significantly improve contactless fingerprint matching capabilities available today. We systematically analyze the extent of complimentary ridge-valley information and introduce new approaches to achieve significantly higher matching accuracy over state-of-art fingerprint matchers commonly employed today. We also investigate least explored options for the fingerprint color-space conversions, which can play a key-role for more accurate contactless fingerprint matching. This paper presents experimental results from different publicly available contactless fingerprint databases using NBIS, MCC and COTS matchers. Our consistently outperforming results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for more accurate contactless fingerprint identification.