Optical coherence tomography for fingerprint acquisition from internal layer - A case study

In this paper a problem of fingerprint-based biometric technique for the use in cases when the fingertips surface has been seriously damaged, making it impossible or extremely difficult to form a conventional reference pattern, is addressed. The optical coherence tomography (OCT) is considered as a method to acquire data enabling later reconstruction of the fingerprint pattern from the internal (mother) layer. A set of two procedures: the first converting the 3-dimensional data resulting from the OCT to the 2-dimensional raw fingerprint image and the second adapting this image to input data for simple, standard fingerprint recognition algorithms, are described. Both procedures make up a complete preprocessing tool. The data set consisted of 149 B-scans forming a 3-dimensional structure describing the surface and shallow internal layer of a part of a fingertip of a person with considerably damaged fingertip surface, making the recognition of the fingerprint with direct method impossible. The obtained results prove that the OCT technique can be efficiently used to solve the considered problem, and that the proposed algorithms form a tool that can be useful for larger databases.