Fingerprint matching by incorporating minutiae discriminability

Traditional minutiae matching algorithms assume that each minutia has the same discriminability. However, this assumption is challenged by at least two facts. One of them is that fingerprint minutiae tend to form clusters, and minutiae points that are spatially close tend to have similar directions with each other. When two different fingerprints have similar clusters, there may be many well matched minutiae. The other one is that false minutiae may be extracted due to low quality fingerprint images, which result in both high false acceptance rate and high false rejection rate. In this paper, we analyze the minutiae discriminability from the viewpoint of global spatial distribution and local quality. Firstly, we propose an effective approach to detect such cluster minutiae which of low discriminability, and reduce corresponding minutiae similarity. Secondly, we use minutiae and their neighbors to estimate minutia quality and incorporate it into minutiae similarity calculation. Experimental results over FVC2004 and FVC-onGoing demonstrate that the proposed approaches are effective to improve matching performance.