Impact of minutiae errors in latent fingerprint identification: Assessment and prediction

Abstract

We study the impact of minutiae errors in the performance of latent fingerprint identification systems. We perform several experiments in which we remove ground-truth minutiae from latent fingerprints and evaluate the effects on matching score and rank-n identification using two different matchers and the popular NIST SD27 dataset. We observe how missing even one minutia from a fingerprint can have a significant negative impact on the identification performance. Our experimental results show that a fingerprint which has a top rank can be demoted to a bottom rank when two or more minutiae are missed. From our experimental results, we have noticed that some minutiae are more critical than others to correctly identify a latent fingerprint. Based on this finding, we have created a dataset to train several machine learning models trying to predict the impact of each minutia in the matching score of a fingerprint identification system. Finally, our best-trained model can successfully predict if a minutia will increase or decrease the matching score of a latent fingerprint.