Detection and Rectification of Distorted Fingerprints

by | Aug 14, 2015 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Detection and Rectification of Distorted Fingerprints

 

Abstract

Elastic distortion of fingerprints is one of the major causes for false non-match. While this problem affects all fingerprint recognition applications, it is especially dangerous in negative recognition applications, such as watch list and de duplication applications. In such applications, malicious users may purposely distort their fingerprints to evade identification. In this paper, we proposed novel algorithms to detect and rectify skin distortion based on a single fingerprint image. Distortion detection is viewed as a two-class classification problem, for which the registered ridge orientation map and period map of a fingerprint are used as the feature vector and a SVM classifier is trained to perform the classification task. Distortion rectification (or equivalently distortion field estimation) is viewed as a regression problem, where the input is a distorted fingerprint and the output is the distortion field. To solve this problem, a database (called reference database) of various distorted reference fingerprints and corresponding distortion fields is built in the offline stage, and then in the online stage, the nearest neighbor of the input fingerprint is found in the reference database and the corresponding distortion field is used to transform the input fingerprint into a normal one. Promising results have been obtained on three databases containing many distorted fingerprints, namely FVC2004 DB1, Tsinghua Distorted Fingerprint database, and the NIST SD27 latent fingerprint database.

The main contributions of this paper are:

1) Compiling case studies of incidents where individuals were found to have altered their fingerprints for circumventing AFIS,

2) Investigating the impact of fingerprint alteration on the accuracy of a commercial fingerprint matcher,

3) Classifying the alterations into three major categories and suggesting possible countermeasures,

4) Developing a technique to automatically detect altered fingerprints based on analyzing orientation field and minutiae distribution, and

5) Evaluating the proposed technique and the NFIQ algorithm on a large database of altered fingerprints provided by a law enforcement agency. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed approach in detecting altered fingerprints and highlight the need to further pursue this problem.

Existing System

In Existing System, since existing fingerprint quality assessment algorithms are designed to examine if an image contains sufficient information (say, minutiae) for matching, they have limited capability in determining if an image is a natural fingerprint or an altered fingerprint. Obliterated fingerprints can evade fingerprint quality control software, depending on the area of the damage. If the affected finger area is small, the existing fingerprint quality assessment software may fail to detect it as an altered fingerprint.

Proposed System

In Proposed System was evaluated at two levels: finger level and subject level. At the finger level, we evaluate the performance of distinguishing between natural and altered fingerprints. At the subject level, we evaluate the performance of distinguishing between subjects with natural fingerprints and those with altered fingerprints.

The proposed algorithm based on the features extracted from the orientation field and minutiae satisfy the three essential requirements for alteration detection algorithm:

1) Fast operational time,

2) High true positive rate at low false positive rate, and

3) Ease of integration into AFIS.

Modules

  1. DETECTION OF ALTERED FINGERPRINTS
  2. Normalization
  3. Orientation field estimation
  4. Orientation field approximation
  5. Feature extraction
  6. ANALYSIS OF MINUTIAE DISTRIBUTION

 

 

Modules Description

  1. DETECTION OF ALTERED FINGERPRINTS
  2. NORMALIZATION

An input fingerprint image is normalized by cropping a rectangular region of the fingerprint, which is located at the center of the fingerprint and aligned along the longitudinal direction of the finger, using the NIST Biometric Image Software (NBIS). This step ensures that the features extracted in the subsequent steps are invariant with respect to translation and rotation of finger.

  1. ORIENTATION FIELD ESTIMATION

The orientation field of the fingerprint is computed using the gradient-based method. The initial orientation field is smoothed averaging filter, followed by averaging the orientations in pixel blocks. A foreground mask is obtained by measuring the dynamic range of gray values of the fingerprint image in local blocks and morphological process for filling holes and removing isolated blocks is performed.

  1. ORIENTATION FIELD APPROXIMATION

The orientation field is approximated by a polynomial model to obtain.

  1. FEATURE EXTRACTION

The error map is computed as the absolute difference between and used to construct the feature vector.

 

 

  1. ANALYSIS OF MINUTIAE DISTRIBUTION

In this module, a minutia in the fingerprint indicates ridge characteristics such as ridge ending or ridge bifurcation. Almost all fingerprint recognition systems use minutiae for matching. In addition to the abnormality observed in orientation field, we also noted that minutiae distribution of altered fingerprints often differs from that of natural fingerprints.

Based on the minutiae extracted from a fingerprint by the open source minutiae extractor in NBIS, a minutiae density map is constructed by using the Parzen window method with uniform kernel function.

CONCLUSIONS

 

False non-match rates of fingerprint matchers are very high in the case of severely distorted fingerprints. This generates a security hole in automatic fingerprint recognition systems which can be utilized by criminals and terrorists. For this reason, it is necessary to develop a fingerprint distortion detection and rectification algorithms to fill the hole. This paper described a novel distorted fingerprint detection and rectification algorithm. For distortion detection, the registered ridge orientation map and period map of a fingerprint are used as the feature vector and a SVM classifier is trained to classify the input fingerprint as distorted or normal. For distortion rectification (or equivalently distortion field estimation), a nearest neighbor regression approach is used to predict the distortion field from the input distorted fingerprint and then the inverse of the distortion field is used to transform the distorted fingerprint into a normal one. The experimental results on FVC2004 DB1, Tsinghua DF database, and NIST SD27 database showed that the proposed algorithm can improve recognition rate of distorted fingerprints evidently. The proposed algorithm based on the features extracted from the orientation field and minutiae satisfies the three essential requirements for alteration detection algorithm:

A major limitation of the current approach is efficiency. Both detection and rectification steps can be significantly speeded up if a robust and accurate fingerprint registration algorithm can be developed. Another limitation is that the current approach does not support rolled fingerprints. It is difficult to collect many rolled fingerprints with various distortion types and meanwhile obtain accurate distortion fields for learning statistical distortion model. It is our ongoing work to address the above limitations.