FM model based fingerprint reconstruction from minutiae template

Abstract

Minutiae-based representation is the most widely adopted fingerprint representation scheme. The compactness of minutiae template has created an impression that the minutiae template does not contain sufficient information to allow the reconstruction of the original fingerprint image. This belief has now been shown to be false; several algorithms have been proposed that can reconstruct fingerprint images from minutiae templates. However, these reconstruction techniques have a common weak point: many spurious minutiae, not included in the original minutiae template, are generated in the reconstructed image. Moreover, some of these techniques can only reconstruct a partial fingerprint. In this paper, a novel fingerprint reconstruction algorithm is proposed, which not only reconstructs the whole fingerprint, but the reconstructed fingerprint contains very few spurious minutiae. A fingerprint image is modeled as a 2D Frequency Modulation (FM) signal whose phase consists of the continuous part and the spiral part (which corresponds to minutiae). An algorithm is proposed to reconstruct the continuous phase from minutiae. The proposed reconstruction algorithm has been evaluated with respect to the success rates of type-I attack (match the reconstructed fingerprint against the original fingerprint) and type-II attack (match the reconstructed fingerprint against the different impressions of the original fingerprint) using a commercial fingerprint recognition system. Both types of attacks were shown to be successful in deceiving the fingerprint system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.