Fast and Accurate Fingerprint Matching Using Expanded Delaunay Triangulation

Efficient and reliable fingerprint matching is crucial for many civilian and forensic applications. Fingerprints are characterized by large intra-class variations (i.e. variability in different impressions from the same finger). This variability manifests itself by the missing or the displacement of genuine minutiae and the detection of spurious minutiae. Displaced, missing and spurious minutiae make fingerprint matching a very challenging pattern recognition problem. Although significant improvements have been made in minutiae-based matching, most of minutiae matching algorithms lack of robustness with respect to displaced, missing and spurious minutiae [4]. This paper introduces EDT-C, a new fingerprint matcher based on minutiae triplets. The proposed matcher uses an extended form of Delaunay Triangulation that allows to take into account, not only genuine minutiae, but also spurious, displaced and missing ones. EDT-C characterizes minutiae triplets by a set of innovative geometric features that help in tolerating linear and non-linear distortions. Finally, EDT-C includes some optimizations that allows to quickly consolidate local matchings and filter non-matching minutia triplets. Experiments show that EDT-C has a reasonable computational cost and is far more accurate than its main competitors.