Fingerprint Recognition

Future Directions
Salil Prabhakar
Digital Persona Inc.
Fingerprint Applications
Commercial Government Forensic
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.
National ID card,
Correctional Facilities,
Drivers License,
Social Security,
Welfare Disbursement,
Border Control,
Passport Control, etc.
Corpse Identification
Criminal Investigation,
Terrorist Identification,
Parenthood determination,
Missing Children, 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
Accuracy
Scale
Usability
10
1
10
5
10
10
90%

99%

99.9999%

Unusable

Hard to Use

Easy to use

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
= no. of corresponding minutiae based on location (x,y) alone
q = no. of corresponding minutiae based on location and direction (u)
A = area of overlap between input and template
C = area of tolerance region = tr
0
2
/A

Probability that one of one input minutiae matches any of the m template minutiae:


Probability that two of two input minutiae matches any of the m template minutiae:


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Probability of a False Correspondence
Accuracy; Information Limitation; Fingerprint Individuality Estimation
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Probability that 1 of n input minutiae matches any of the m template minutiae:
Probability that q of n input minutiae match any q of the m template minutiae:
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This finally reduces to:

Probability of a False Correspondence
Accuracy; Information Limitation; Fingerprint Individuality Estimation
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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:
Let l be such that P(min(|u
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location. minutia in tolerance length the is 2 where
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M
Upper Bound on Fingerprint Accuracy
Accuracy; Information Limitation; Fingerprint Individuality Estimation
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
Database m,n,q P(Correspondence)
MSU_DBI 46, 46, 12 5.8 x 10
-2
Theoretical
Empirical
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
Twin-twin minutiae matching
Same-fingerprint-type matching
Quantify the genetic similarity in fingerprint images
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 = 0.04
False Minutiae=27
Quality Index = 0.53
False Minutiae=7

Quality Index = 0.96
False Minutiae=0

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:



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
( ) ( ) ( )
( ) ( ) ( )
Q
N
Q
N
Q
N
Q Q Q
P
M
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M
P
M
P P P
y x y x Q
y x y x P
u u
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1 1 1
1 1 1

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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



0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
Error (%)
Penetr
ation
(%)
minutiae triplets
orientation image
FingerCode
Combination
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