Beyond minutiae: A fingerprint individuality model with pattern, ridge and pore features

Abstract

Fingerprints are considered to be unique because they contain various distinctive features, including minutiae, ridges, pores, etc. Some attempts have been made to model the minutiae in order to get a quantitative measure for uniqueness or individuality of fingerprints. However, these models do not fully exploit information contained in non- minutiae features that is utilized for matching fingerprints in practice. We propose an individuality model that incorporates all three levels of fingerprint features: pattern or class type (Level 1), minutiae and ridges (Level 2), and pores (Level 3). Correlations among these features and their distributions are also taken into account in our model. Experimental results show that the theoretical estimates of fingerprint individuality using our model consistently follow the empirical values based on the public domain NIST-4 database. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.