Fingerprint Recognition

Future Directions

Salil Prabhakar
Digital Persona Inc.
Fingerprint Applications
Commercial
Computer Network Logon,
Electronic Data Security,
E-Commerce,
Internet Access,
ATM, Credit Card,
Physical Access Control,
Cellular Phones
Personal Digital Assistant,
Medical Records,
Distance Leaning, etc.
Government Forensic
National ID card, Corpse Identification
Correctional Facilities, Criminal Investigation,
Driver’s License, Terrorist Identification,
Social Security, Parenthood determination,
Welfare Disbursement, Missing Children, etc.
Border Control,
Passport Control, etc.
Fingerprint Application Functionality
■ Positive Identification
– Is this person truly know to the system
– Commercial applications (network logon)
– Desirable: low cost and user-friendly

■ Large Scale Identification

– Is this person in the database
– Government and Forensic applications (prevent double dipping; multiple
passports)
– Desirable: high throughput with little human intervention

■ Surveillance and Screening

– Is this a wanted person
– Airport watch list
– Fingerprints are not suitable
Challenges
■ To design a system that would operate on the
extremes of all three axis simultaneously

Scale

1010

105

101 90% 99% 99.9999%

Unusable
Accuracy
Hard to Use
Easy to use

Usability
Reasons for Accuracy Challenges

■ Information Limitation
– Due to individuality, poor presentation, and inconsistent acquisition

■ Representation Limitation
– Design and choice of representation (features) and quality of feature
extraction algorithms (especially for poor quality fingerprints)

■ Invariance Limitation
– Incorrect modeling of invariant relationships among features
Fingerprint Individuality Estimation
Accuracy; Information Limitation

■ Assumptions for theoretical individuality estimation

– consider only minutiae (ending and bifurcation) features
– minutiae locations and directions are independent
– minutiae locations are uniformly distributed
– correspondence of a minutiae pair is an independent event
– “quality” is not explicitly taken into account
– ridge frequency is assumes to be constant across population and spatially uniform in the
same finger
– analysis of matching of different impressions of the same finger binds the parameters of
the probability of matching prints from different fingers
– an alignment between two fingerprints has been established
Probability of a False Correspondence
Accuracy; Information Limitation; Fingerprint Individuality Estimation
■ m = no. of minutiae in template
■ n = no. of minutiae in input
■ ρ = no. of corresponding minutiae based on location (x,y) alone
■ q = no. of corresponding minutiae based on location and direction (θ )
■ A = area of overlap between input and template
■ C = area of tolerance region = π r02/A

Probability that one of one input minutiae matches any of the m template minutiae:
 mC 
 
 A 
Probability that two of two input minutiae matches any of the m template minutiae:

2x
mC   A − mC 
 x 
 A   A −C 
Probability of a False Correspondence
Accuracy; Information Limitation; Fingerprint Individuality Estimation

Probability that 1 of n input minutiae matches any of the m template minutiae:

 n  mC  A − mC 
p (A , C , m , n , ρ ) =   
 1  A  A − ρC 

Probability that q of n input minutiae match any q of the m template minutiae:

 n  mC  (m − 1)C ... (m − ρ − 1)C  ×
p (A , C , m , n , ρ ) =   
 ρ  A  A − C   A − ( ρ − 1)C 
 A − mC  A − (m − 1)C   A − (m − (n − ρ + 1))C 
  ... .
 A − ρC  A − ( ρ + 1 )C   A − (n − 1 )C 

This finally reduces to:

 m  M − m 
p (M , C , m , n , ρ ) =
 ρ  n − ρ  where M ≡
A
 M  C
n 
Probability of a False Correspondence
Accuracy; Information Limitation; Fingerprint Individuality Estimation

Let l be such that P(min(|θ ’i-θ j|,360-|θ ’i- θ j|)≤ θ 0) =l. Then,

  m  M − m  
    
min( m ,n )  ρ 
   n − ρ   ρ  q ρ −q  A
p (M , m , n , q ) = ∑  ×  (l ) (1 − l ) , where M ≡
ρ =q
 M 
  q   C
 
 n  

Finally, since minutiae can lie only on ridges, i.e., along a curve of length A/w,
where w is the ridge-period, M is modified as:

A /w
M≡ where 2r0 is the length tolerance in minutia location.
2r0
Upper Bound on Fingerprint Accuracy
Accuracy; Information Limitation; Fingerprint Individuality Estimation

Theoretical
M,m,n,q P(Correspondence)
248, 46, 46, 46 1.33 x 10-77
248, 46, 46, 12 5.86 x 10-7
70, 12, 12, 12 1.22 x 10-20

Empirical
Database m,n,q P(Correspondence)
MSU_DBI 46, 46, 12 5.8 x 10-2

The probabilities of false correspondences for various values of q are computed from
our theoretical model based on the parameters estimated from a Ground Truth database
and the MSU_DBI databases and compared with the empirical probability of false
correspondence obtained from the MSU_DBI database using an automatic fingerprint
matcher.
The entry (70, 12, 12, 12) corresponds to the 12-point guideline.
Lower Bound on Fingerprint Accuracy
Accuracy; Information Limitation; Fingerprint Individuality Estimation

■ Quantify the genetic similarity in fingerprint images

Twin-twin minutiae matching Same-fingerprint-type matching

Information Limitation: Conclusion
Accuracy; Information Limitation

■ There is an incredible amount of information content in fingerprints

■ A minutiae-based fingerprint identification system can distinguish between
identical twins
■ The performance of state-of-the-art automatic fingerprint matchers do not
even come close to the theoretical performance
■ Performance of fingerprint matcher is depended on the fingerprint class
and thus may depend upon target population
■ Fingerprint classification may not be very effective in genetically related
population
■ Fingerprint identification accuracy may suffer in certain demographics
Fingerprint Representation
Accuracy; Representation Limitation

■ Ideal representation would maximize the inter-class

variability and minimize the intra-class variability

Fingerprints from the same finger

Minutiae-based representation
may not be most suitable Fingerprints from two different fingers

Ridge feature-based representation

may not be most suitable
Fingerprint Representation
Accuracy; Representation Limitation

Quality Index = 0.96 Quality Index = 0.53 Quality Index = 0.04

False Minutiae=0 False Minutiae=7 False Minutiae=27
Conventional Representations
Accuracy; Representation Limitation

■ Minutiae-based
– Sequential design based on the following modules:
Segmentation, local ridge orientation estimation (singularity and
more detection), local ridge frequency estimation, fingerprint
enhancement, minutiae detection, and minutiae filtering and
post-processing.

■ Ridge Feature-based
– Size and shape of fingerprint, number, type, and position of
singularities (cores and deltas), spatial relationship and
geometrical attributes of the ridge lines, shape features, global
and local texture information, sweat pores, fractal features.
Representations: Future Directions
Accuracy; Representation Limitation

■ Improvement of current representations through robust

and reliable domain-specific image processing
techniques such as:
– Model-based orientation field estimation
– Robust image enhancement and masking

■ New richer representations

■ Fusion of various representations

Fingerprint Invariance
Accuracy; Invariance Limitation

■ Ideal matcher would perfectly model the invariant

relationship in different impressions of the same
finger

Two good quality fingerprint images from the same finger

A fingerprint matching algorithm that assumes a rigid transformation will be unable to match
Minutiae Matching
Accuracy; Invariance Limitation

■ Given two sets of minutiae points:

(( ) (
P = x1P , y1P ,θ1P ,  , xMP , y MP ,θ MP ))
Q = (( xQ
1 , y1Q ,θ1Q ),  , ( x Q
N , y NQ ,θ NQ ))
■ where x, y, and q are the x-coordinate, y-coordinate, and
minutiae direction.

■ No point correspondence is known a priori

■ Nonlinear deformation between point sets

■ Spurious minutiae and missing minutiae

■ Errors in minutiae position and minutiae direction

Matching: Future Directions
Accuracy; Invariance Limitation

■ Alignment remains a difficult problem – develop

alignment techniques that remain robust under the
presence of false features

■ Understand and model fingerprint deformation

■ Fusion of various matchers (based on the same or

different representations)
Scale
■ 1:N Identification is a much harder problem (N large)
– Accuracy
– Speed
■ Traditionally: classify fingerprint into one of the few (4 or so)
predefined fingerprint types
■ Problem: too few distinct bins; uneven natural distribution into
these bins; many “ambiguous” fingerprints (17% NIST4 has
two labels)

a) b) c)
Scale: Future Directions
■ Continuous classification
■ Feature-based indexing (search and retrieval) schemes
(e.g., minutiae triplets)
■ Fast matchers
■ Classifier combination
70
minutiae triplets
60
ration
Penet

(%)

50
orientation image
40

30 Combination

20 FingerCode

10

0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
Error (%)
Multiple Biometrics; Fusion
■ A decision (and lower) level fusion of multiple biometrics can
improve performance

■ In identification systems, fusion can also improve speed

■ Independence among modalities is key

■ Even combination of correlated modalities can be no worse than the

best performing modality alone

■ Best combination scheme would be application dependent

Performance Evaluation
■ Evaluation types: technology, scenario, operational
■ Dependent on composition of the population
(occupation, age, demographics, race), the
environment, the system operational mode, etc
■ Ideally, characterize the application-independent
performance in laboratory and predict technology,
scenario, and operational performances
■ Standardization and independent testing
■ Parametric and non-parametric estimation of
confidence intervals and database size
■ Parametric and non-parametric and statistical modeling
of inter-class and intra-class variations;
Usability, Security, Privacy
■ Biometrics are not secrets and not revocable
■ Encryption, secure system design, and liveness
detection solve this problem

■ Unintended functional scope; unintended application

scope; covert acquisition
■ Legislation; self-regulation; independent regulatory
organizations
■ Biometric Cryptosystems: fingerprint fuzzy vault
– Alignment
– Similarity metric in encrypted domain
– Variable and unordered representation
– Performance loss; ROC remains the bottleneck