Novel approaches for exclusive and continuous fingerprint classification

Abstract

This paper proposes novel exclusive and continuous approaches to guide the search and the retrieval in fingerprint image databases. Both approaches are useful to perform a coarse level classification of fingerprint images before fingerprint authentication tasks. Our approaches are characterized by: (1) texture image descriptors based on pairs of multi-resolution decomposition methods that encode effectively global and local fingerprint information, with similarity measures used for fingerprint matching purposes, and (2) a novel multi-class object recognition method based on the Optimum Path Forest classifier. Experiments were carried out on the standard NIST-4 dataset aiming to study the discriminative and scalability capabilities of our approaches. The high classification rates allow us demonstrate the feasibility and validity of our approaches for characterizing fingerprint images accurately. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.