Pre-Registration for Improved Latent Fingerprint Identification

Abstract—Comparing a latent fingerprint minutiae set against a tenprint fingerprint minutiae set using an automated fingerprint identification system is a challenging problem. This is mainly because latent fingerprints obtained from crime scenes are mostly partial fingerprints, and most automated systems expect approximately the same number of minutiae between query and the reference fingerprint under comparison for good per-formance. In this work, we propose a methodology to reduce the minutiae set of tenprint with respect to that of query latent minutiae set by registering the orientation field of latent fingerprint with the tenprint orientation field. By reducing the search space of minutiae from the tenprint, we can improve the performance of automated identification systems for latent fingerprints. We report the performance of our registration algorithm on the NIST-SD27 database as well as the improvement in the Rank Identification accuracy of a standard minutiae-based automated system. I