Fingerprint pattern and minutiae fusion in various operational scenarios

Abstract

This paper discusses the advantages of score-level fusion between pattern and minutiae based fingerprint verification algorithms in various operational scenarios. The different scenarios considered are sensor interoperability, environmental conditions and low quality enrollments. These are commonly encountered in real-life deployments of fingerprint-based biometric systems, specifically for large-scale distributed systems and physical access control. Moreover, the approach for jointly utilizing the conceptually different pattern and minutiae algorithms is based on various well-known scorelevel fusion techniques with single finger presentations. In contrast to previous studies on multi-matcher score-level fusion for fingerprint verification, where only moderate performance improvement were reported, the results presented here show significant performance gains. The two main contributing factors to these findings are that the two algorithms are conceptually different and the effects of the different operational scenarios. For the latter, improvement in accuracy due to fusion is even more significant in non-ideal and challenging operating conditions. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.