Security and matching of partial fingerprint recognition systems

Despite advances in fingerprint identification techniques, matching incomplete or partial fingerprints still poses a difficult challenge. While the introduction of compact silicon chip-based sensors that capture only a part of the 14 fingerprint area have made this problem important from a commercial perspective, there is also considerable interest on the topic for processing partial and latent fingerprints obtained at crime scenes. Attempts to match partial fingerprints using singular ridge structures-based alignment techniques fail when the partial print does not include such structures (e.g... core or delta). We present a multi-path fingerprint matching approach that utilizes localized secondary features derived using only the relative information of minutiae. Since the minutia-based fingerprint representation, is an ANSI-NIST standard, our approach has the advantage of being directly applicable to already existing databases. We also analyze the vulnerability of partial fingerprint identification systems to brute force attacks. The described matching approach has been tested on one of FVC2002's DB1 database(11). The experimental results show that our approach achieves an equal error rate of 1.25% and a total error rate of 1.8% (with FAR at 0.2% and FRR at 1.6%).