The best fingerprint compression standard yet

Modern fingerprint compression and reconstruction standards, such as those used by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI), are based upon the 9/7 discrete wavelet transform. This paper describes how a genetic algorithm was used to evolve wavelet and scaling numbers for each level of a multiresolution analysis (MRA) transform that consistently outperforms the 9/7 wavelet for fingerprint compression and reconstruction tasks. Our evolved transforms also improve upon wavelets optimized by a genetic algorithm via the lifting scheme, and thus establish a new state-of-the-art in this important application area.