Filterbank-based fingerprint matching

With identity fraud in our society reaching unprecedented proportions and with an increasing emphasis on the emerging automatic personal identification applications, biometrics-based verification, especially fingerprint-based identification, is receiving a lot of attention. There are two major shortcomings of the traditional approaches to fingerprint representation. For a considerable fraction of population, the representations based on explicit detection of complete ridge structures in the fingerprint are difficult to extract automatically. The widely used minutiae-based representation does not utilize a significant component of the rich discriminatory information available in the fingerprints. Local ridge structures cannot be completely characterized by minutiae. Further, minutiae-based matching has difficulty in quickly matching two fingerprint images containing a different number of unregistered minutiae points. The proposed filter-based algorithm uses a bank of Gabor filters to capture both local and global details in a fingerprint as a compact fixed length FingerCode. The fingerprint matching is based on the Euclidean distance between the two corresponding FingerCodes and hence is extremely fast. We are able to achieve a verification accuracy which is only marginally inferior to the best results of minutiae-based algorithms published in the open literature. Our system performs better than a state-of-the-art minutiae-based system when the performance requirement of the application system does not demand a very low false acceptance rate. Finally, we show that the matching performance can be improved by combining the decisions of the matchers based on complementary (minutiae-based and filter-based) fingerprint information.