Research on Gender-related Fingerprint Features
This work addresses gender identification from fingerprints, an incremental improvement in biometrics with potential applications in forensic science.
The paper tackled gender classification from fingerprints by proposing Dense Dilated Convolution ResNet (DDC-ResNet), achieving 96.5% average accuracy and up to 0.9752 for males and 0.9548 for females, and identified the right ring finger as most effective.
Fingerprint is an important biological feature of human body, which contains abundant gender information. At present, the academic research of fingerprint gender characteristics is generally at the level of understanding, while the standardization research is quite limited. In this work, we propose a more robust method, Dense Dilated Convolution ResNet (DDC-ResNet) to extract valid gender information from fingerprints. By replacing the normal convolution operations with the atrous convolution in the backbone, prior knowledge is provided to keep the edge details and the global reception field can be extended. We explored the results in 3 ways: 1) The efficiency of the DDC-ResNet. 6 typical methods of automatic feature extraction coupling with 9 mainstream classifiers are evaluated in our dataset with fair implementation details. Experimental results demonstrate that the combination of our approach outperforms other combinations in terms of average accuracy and separate-gender accuracy. It reaches 96.5% for average and 0.9752 (males)/0.9548 (females) for separate-gender accuracy. 2) The effect of fingers. It is found that the best performance of classifying gender with separate fingers is achieved by the right ring finger. 3) The effect of specific features. Based on the observations of the concentrations of fingerprints visualized by our approach, it can be inferred that loops and whorls (level 1), bifurcations (level 2), as well as line shapes (level 3) are connected with gender. Finally, we will open source the dataset that contains 6000 fingerprint images