Reconstructing orientation field from fingerprint minutiae to improve minutiae-matching accuracy

Minutiae are very important features for fingerprint representation, and most practical fingerprint recognition systems only store the minutiae template in the database for further usage. The conventional methods to utilize minutiae information are treating it as a point set and finding the matched points from different minutiae sets. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm to use minutiae for fingerprint recognition, in which the fingerprint's orientation field is reconstructed from minutiae and further utilized in the matching stage to enhance the system's performance. First, we produce "virtual" minutiae by using interpolation in the sparse area, and then use an orientation model to reconstruct the orientation field from all "real" and "virtual" minutiae. A decision fusion scheme is used to combine the reconstructed orientation field matching with conventional minutiae-based matching. Since orientation field is an important global feature of fingerprints, the proposed method can obtain better results than conventional methods. Experimental results illustrate its effectiveness.