Coarse Fingerprint Registration Using Orientation Fields

Abstract

The majority of traditional research into automated fingerprint identification has focused on algorithms using minutiae-based features. However, shortcomings of this approach are becoming apparent due to the difficulty of extracting minutiae points from noisy or low-quality images. Therefore, there has been increasing interest in algorithms based on nonminutiae features in recent years. One vital stage in most fingerprint verification systems is registration, which involves recovering the transformation parameters that align features from each fingerprint. This paper investigates the use of orientation fields for registration; an approach that has the potential to perform robustly for poor-quality images. Three diverse algorithms have been implemented for the task. The first algorithm is based on the generalized Hough transform, and it works by accumulating evidence for transformations in a discretized parameter space. The second algorithm is based on identifying distinctive local orientations, and using these as landmarks for alignment. The final algorithm follows the path of steepest descent in the parameter space to quickly find solutions that are locally optimal. The performance of these three algorithms is evaluated using an FVC2002 dataset.