Pre-registration for improved latent fingerprint identification

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. R. P. Krish, J. Fiérrez, D. Ramos, J. Ortega-Garcia, J. Bigün, "Pre-registration for Improved Latent Fingerprint Identification" in 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), Stockholm (Sweden), 2014, 696 - 701Comparing a latent fingerprint minutiae set against a ten print 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 performance. In this work, we propose a methodology to reduce the minutiae set of ten print with respect to that of query latent minutiae set by registering the orientation field of latent fingerprint with the ten print orientation field. By reducing the search space of minutiae from the ten print, 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.R.K. was supported by a Marie Curie Fellowship under project BBfor2 (FP7-ITN-238803). This work has also been partially supported by Spanish Guardia Civil, Cátedra UAM-Telefónica, and projects Bio-Shield (TEC2012-34881) and Contexts (S2009/TIC-1485)