Pre-registration of latent fingerprints based on orientation field

In this study, the authors present a hierarchical algorithm to register a partial fingerprint against a full fingerprint using only the orientation fields. In the first level, they shortlist possible locations for registering the partial fingerprint in the full fingerprint using a normalised correlation measure, taking various rotations into account. As a second level, on those candidate locations, they calculate three other similarity measures. They then perform score fusion for all the estimated similarity scores to locate the final registration. By registering a partial fingerprint against a full fingerprint, they can reduce the search space of the minutiae set in the full fingerprint, thereby improving the result of partial fingerprint identification, particularly for poor quality latent fingerprints. They report the rank identification improvements of two minutiae-based automated fingerprint identification systems on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)-Special Database 27 database when they use the authors hierarchical registration as a pre-alignment. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2015.R.K. was supported by a Marie Curie Fellowship under project BBfor2 from European Commission (FP7-ITN-238803). This work has also been partially supported by Spanish Guardia Civil, and project Bio-Shield (TEC2012–34881) from Spanish MICINN.BBfor