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Fingerprint Recognition
2.1 Introduction
A fingerprint is the representation of the epidermis of a finger: it consists of
a pattern of interleaved ridges and valleys [16]. Fingertip ridges evolved over
the years to allow humans to grasp and grip objects. Like everything in the
human body, fingerprint ridges form through a combination of genetic and
environmental factors. In fact, fingerprint formation is similar to the growth
of capillaries and blood vessels in angiogenesis. The genetic code in DNA gives
general instructions on the way skin should form in a developing fetus, but
the specific way it forms is a result of random events (the exact position of
the fetus in the womb at a particular moment, and the exact composition
and density of surrounding amniotic fluid). This is the reason why even the
fingerprints of identical twins are different [26]. Fingerprints are fully formed
(i.e. became stable) at about seven months of fetus development and finger
ridge configurations do not change throughout the life of an individual, except
in case of accidents such as cuts on the fingertips [3]. This property makes
fingerprints a very attractive biometric identifier.
Human fingerprints have been discovered on a large number of archaeologi-
cal artifacts and historical items [16]. Although these findings provide evidence
to show that ancient people were aware of the individuality of fingerprints, it
was not until the late sixteenth century that the modern scientific fingerprint
technique was first initiated [20, 15, 29]. In 1686, Marcello Malpighi, a profes-
sor of anatomy at the university of Bologna, noted in his writings the presence
of ridges, spirals and loops in fingerprints. Since then, a large number of re-
searchers have invested huge amounts of effort on fingerprint studies. Henry
Fauld, in 1880, was the first to scientifically suggest the individuality of finger-
prints based on an empirical observation. At the same time, Herschel asserted
that he had practiced fingerprint recognition for about 20 years [29, 34]. These
findings established the foundation of modern fingerprint recognition. In the
late nineteenth century, Sir Francis Galton conducted an extensive study on
fingerprints [20]; he introduced the minutiae features for fingerprint matching
24 Davide Maltoni and Raffaele Cappelli
Fig. 2.1. Fingerprint images acquired off-line with the ink technique.
Nowadays, most civil and criminal AFISs accept live-scan digital images
acquired by directly sensing the finger surface with an electronic fingerprint
scanner. No ink is required in this method, and all that a subject has to do
is to press his/her finger against the flat surface of a live-scan scanner (see
Figure 2.2). The most important part of a fingerprint scanner is the sensor
(or sensing element), which is the component where the fingerprint image is
formed. Almost all the existing sensors belong to one of the three families:
optical, solid-state, and ultrasound [16] [44].
• Optical sensors. Frustrated Total Internal Reflection (FTIR) is the oldest
and most used live-scan acquisition technique. The finger touches the top
side of a glass prism, but while the ridges enter in contact with the prism
surface, the valleys remain at a certain distance; the left side of the prism
is illuminated through a diffused light. The light entering the prism is
reflected at the valleys, and absorbed at the ridges. The lack of reflection
allows the ridges to be discriminated from the valleys. The light rays exit
from the right side of the prism and are focused through a lens onto a
CCD or CMOS image sensor.
26 Davide Maltoni and Raffaele Cappelli
Fig. 2.2. The three fingerprint scanners used in FVC2006 [1] and an image collected
through each of them.
In a fingerprint image, ridges (also called ridge lines) are dark whereas valleys
are bright (see Figure 2.3a). Ridges and valleys often run in parallel; sometimes
they bifurcate and sometimes they terminate. When analyzed at the global
level, the fingerprint pattern exhibits one or more regions where the ridge
lines assume distinctive shapes. These regions (called singularities or singular
regions) may be classified into three typologies: loop, delta, and whorl (see
Figure 2.3b). Singular regions belonging to loop, delta, and whorl types are
typically characterized by ∩, ∆, and O shapes, respectively. The core point
(used by some algorithms to pre-align fingerprints) corresponds to the center
of the north most (uppermost) loop type singularity.
Fig. 2.3. a) Ridges and valleys in a fingerprint image; b) singular regions (white
boxes) and core points (circles) in fingerprint images.
28 Davide Maltoni and Raffaele Cappelli
At the local level, other important features, called minutiae can be found
in the fingerprint patterns. Minutia refers to the various ways in which the
ridges can be discontinuous. For example, a ridge can abruptly come to an
end (termination), or can divide into two ridges (bifurcation) (Figure 2.4).
Although several types of minutiae can be considered, usually only a coarse
classification (into these two types) is adopted to deal with the practical dif-
ficulty in automatically discerning the different types with high accuracy.
Fig. 2.4. Termination (white) and bifurcation (gray) minutiae in a sample finger-
print.
The local ridge orientation at point (x, y) is the angle θxy that the fingerprint
ridges, crossing through an arbitrary small neighborhood centered at (x, y),
forms with the horizontal axis. Robust computation methods, based on local
averaging of gradient estimates, have been proposed by Donahue and Rokhlin
[17], Ratha, Chen and Jain [36], and Bazen and Gerez [5]. The local ridge
frequency (or density) fxy at point (x, y) is the the number of ridges per
unit length along a hypothetical segment centered at (x, y) and orthogonal to
the local ridge orientation θxy . Hong, Wan, and Jain [24] estimate local ridge
frequency by counting the average number of pixels between two consecutive
peaks of gray-levels along the direction normal to the local ridge orientation.
In the method proposed by Maio and Maltoni [31], the ridge pattern is locally
modeled as a sinusoidal-shaped surface, and the variation theorem is exploited
to estimate the unknown frequency.
2 Fingerprint Recognition 29
Fig. 2.5. Graphical representation of fingerprint feature extraction steps and their
interrelations.
30 Davide Maltoni and Raffaele Cappelli
2.3.2 Segmentation
The segmentation task consists in separating the fingerprint area from the
background. Because fingerprint images are striated patterns, using a global
or local thresholding technique does not allow the fingerprint area to be effec-
tively isolated. Robust segmentation techniques are discussed in [36][30][4].
Most of the approaches proposed in the literature for singularity detection op-
erate on the fingerprint orientation image. The best-known method is based
on Poincaré index (Kawagoe and Tojo [28]). A number of alternative ap-
proaches have been proposed for singularity detection; they can be coarsely
classified in: 1) methods based on local characteristics of the orientation image,
2) partitioning-based methods, 3) core detection and fingerprint registration
approaches [16].
Fig. 2.6. a) A fingerprint gray-scale image; b) the image obtained after enhance-
ment and binarization; c) the image obtained after thinning; d) termination and
bifurcation minutiae detected through the pixel-wise computation of the crossing
number.
Some authors have proposed minutiae extraction approaches that work di-
rectly on the gray-scale images without binarization and thinning. This choice
is motivated by the following considerations: i) a significant amount of infor-
mation may be lost during the binarization process; ii) thinning may introduce
a large number of spurious minutiae; iii) most of the binarization techniques
do not provide satisfactory results when applied to low-quality images. Maio
and Maltoni [30] proposed a direct gray-scale minutiae extraction technique,
whose basic idea is to track the ridge lines in the gray-scale image, by ‘sailing’
according to the local orientation of the ridge pattern.
A post-processing stage (called minutiae filtering) is often useful in remov-
ing the spurious minutiae detected in highly corrupted regions or introduced
by previous processing steps (e.g., thinning) [16].
2.4 Matching
Fig. 2.7. a) Each row shows a pair of impressions of the same finger, taken from the
FVC2002 DB1, which were falsely non-matched by most of the algorithms submitted
to FVC2002 [32]; b) each row shows a pair of impressions of different fingers, taken
from the FVC2002 databases which were falsely matched by some of the algorithms
submitted to FVC2002.
Fig. 2.8. Minutiae matching by the Chang et al. approach [11]. Figures a) and b)
show the minutiae extracted from the template and the input fingerprint, respec-
tively; c) the minutiae are coarsely superimposed and the principal pair is marked
with an ellipse; d) each circle denotes a pair of minutiae as mated by the algorithm.
State University. The aim of the initiative was to establish a common bench-
mark for comparing fingerprint matching algorithms, allowing industrial and
academic organizations to compare performance and track improvements of
their algorithms. FVC2000 received significant attention from both academic
and commercial organizations; several research groups started using FVC2000
datasets for their experimentations and some companies, which initially did
not participate in the competition, requested the organizers to certify their
performance on the FVC2000 benchmark. The great encouragement received,
induced the authors to organize similar initiatives in the year 2002 (FVC2002
[32]), 2004 (FVC2004 [10]), and 2006 (FVC2006, which, at the time this chap-
ter is being written, is still in progress). The growing interest in performance
evaluation of fingerprint recognition algorithms is confirmed by the increas-
ing number of participants to FVC (Table 2.1): the number of organizations
that registered for the competition grew from 25 (in FVC2000) to 150 (in
FVC2006), and the number of algorithms evaluated grew from 11 to 70.
The Fingerprint Vendor Technology Evaluation (FpVTE) 2003 was orga-
nized to evaluate the accuracy of fingerprint identification and verification
systems [43]. FpVTE2003 was conducted by the U.S. National Institute of
Standards & Technology (NIST) as part of its statutory mandate under sec-
tion 403(c) of the USA PATRIOT Act to certify biometric technologies that
may be used in the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology
(US-VISIT) Program. Eighteen different companies participated, with 34 sys-
tems tested, including the NIST Verification Test Bed fingerprint benchmark
system. It is generally believed that FpVTE2003 was the most comprehen-
sive evaluation of fingerprint matching systems ever executed, particularly in
terms of the number of fingerprints in the benchmark databases. Table 2.2
summarizes the main differences between FVC2004 and FpVTE2003.
Table 2.2. A comparison between FVC2004 and FpVTE2003, see [10] for more
details.
FVC2004 FpVTE2003
Algorithms Open Category: 41 Large Scale Test (LST): 13
Evaluated Light Category: 26 Medium Scale Test (MST): 18
Small Scale Test (SST): 3 (SST
only)
Subject Students (24 years old on Operational fingerprint data from a
population the average) variety of U.S. Government sources
including low-quality fingers and
low-quality sources
Fingerprint Single finger flat Mixed formats (flat, slap, and
format impressions acquired rolled from different sources;
through low-cost scanned paper cards, and from
commercial fingerprint FBI-compliant fingerprint scanners)
scanners (including small
area and sweeping sensors)
Perturbations Deliberately exaggerated Difficulties mainly due to intrinsic
perturbations (rotation, low-quality fingers of some subjects
distortion, dry/wet and sometimes due to
fingers, ...) non-cooperative users
Database Databases are available to Databases are not available due to
availability the scientific community data protection and privacy issues
Data collection All the data were acquired Data coming from existing U.S.
for this event Government sources
Database size 4 databases, each 48,105 fingerprint sets from 25,309
containing 800 fingerprints subjects
from 100 fingers
Evaluation type Independent Strongly Independent Supervised
supervised
Anonymous Allowed Not allowed
participation
Best EER Best average EER: 2.07% Best EER on MST: 0.2% (MST is
(in the Open Category) the FpVTE2003 test closest to
FVC2004 Open Category)
databases is not only expensive in terms of time and money, it is also prob-
lematic because of the repetitive monotony of the work (which often leads
to collection errors) and of privacy legislation protecting the use of personal
data. In several contexts, a synthetic generation of realistic fingerprint images
can help to solve the above problems. The most desirable property of such a
synthetic fingerprint generator is that it correctly models the various inter-
class and intra-class variations in fingerprint images observed in nature. In
particular, it should be able to generate realistic “impressions” of the same
“virtual finger,” by simulating:
• different finger areas touching the sensors;
• non-linear distortions produced by non-orthogonal pressure of the finger
against the sensor;
• variations in the ridge line thickness given by pressure intensity or by skin
dampness;
• small cuts on the fingertip and other kinds of noise.
The SFinGe approach introduced in [7] is a synthetic fingerprint generator
that meets the above requirements and can be used to automatically cre-
ate large databases of very-realistic fingerprints images (Figure 2.10), thus
allowing fingerprint recognition algorithms to be effectively trained, tested,
optimized, and compared. The synthetic fingerprints generated emulate im-
ages acquired with electronic fingerprint scanners, since almost all applica-
tions now require an on-line acquisition. In any case, impressions similar to
those acquired by the traditional “ink-technique” may be generated with a
few changes to the algorithm.
Fig. 2.10. Examples of synthetic fingerprint images generated by the SFinGe ap-
proach [7].
2 Fingerprint Recognition 39
2.6 Conclusions
Automatic fingerprint recognition was one of the first applications of machine
pattern recognition (it dates back to more than fifty years ago). Because of
this, there is a popular misconception that fingerprint recognition is a fully
solved problem. On the contrary, fingerprint recognition is still a complex and
very challenging pattern recognition task. The most important open issues
can be summarized as follows.
Improved feature extraction and matching algorithms. Designing algo-
rithms capable of extracting effective features and matching them in a robust
way is very hard, especially in poor quality fingerprint images and when low-
cost acquisition devices with a small area are used. Although state-of-the-art
fingerprint recognition systems are nowadays effective in matching fingerprints
at a very high speed (millions of matches per second) their level of sophis-
tication still cannot rival that of a well-trained fingerprint expert. Further
research is necessary to develop feature extraction approaches that can reli-
ably and consistently extract a set of features that provide rich information,
comparable to those commonly used by human experts.
Securing fingerprint-based biometric systems. As any other authentication
technique, fingerprint recognition is not totally spoof-proof. The main po-
tential threats for fingerprint-based systems are [16]: 1) attacking the com-
munication channels; 2) attacking specific software modules (e.g. replacing
the feature extractor or the matcher with a Trojan horse); 3) attacking the
database of enrolled templates; 4) presenting fake fingers to the sensor. Re-
cently, the feasibility of the last two types of attacks was reported by some
researchers: as far as point 4) is concerned, in [33] it was shown that it is
actually possible to spoof fingerprint recognition systems with well-made fake
fingertips; as to point 3), in [9], a technique to reverse-engineer minutiae-
based fingerprint templates was described. A considerable amount of research
on fake-detection approaches (e.g., [2]) and template-protection techniques
[40] is definitely needed to address the most critical security threats.
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